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MACBETH, KING LEAR 

AND 
CONTEMPORARY HISTORY 



CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

C. F. CLAY, Manager 
LONDON : FETT ER L AN E, E.G. 4 




NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN CO. 

BOMBAY ^ 

CALCUTTA I MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD, 

MADRAS j 

TORONTO : THE MACMILLAN CO. OF 

CANADA, LTD. 
TOKYO : MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 



ALL RIGHIS RESERVED 



MACBETH, KING LEAR 

&> CONTEMPORARY HISTORY 

BEING A STUDY OF THE RELATIONS OF THE PLAY 
OF MACBETH TO THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF JAMES I, 
THE DARNLEY MURDER AND THE ST BARTHOLOMEW 
MASSACRE AND ALSO OF KING LEAR AS SYMBOLIC 
MYTHOLOGY 

BY 

LILIAN WINSTANLEY, M.A. 

Lecturer in English in the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. 

Sometime Fellow and John Bright Fellow of the Victoria University of 

Manchester. Author of Hamlet and the Scottish Succession^ etc. 



CAMBRIDGE 

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1922 






•:b t. b ^ U 
> 1- 



PREFACE 

I WISH, as before, to thank my historical colleagues at 
Aberystwyth — Mr Sydney Herbert, Dr E. A. Lewis and 
Professor Stanley Roberts — for the invaluable assistance 
they have given me in recommending books and sources and 
in discussing this work during its progress. I wish especially 
to thank Professor Stanley Roberts for a particularly 
generous encouragement, of the more value because of his 
own wide knowledge of Elizabethan history. 

I also desire to express my gratitude to Mr Hubert Hall 
of the Record Office for his very kind assistance during my 
work there. 

To readers who are interested in these studies of Shakespeare 
so far as they have gone I should Uke to say that the evidence 
will be cumulative, each study confirming its predecessors. 
Thus, in searching for contemporary parallels to King Lear 
I had the good fortune to find a book, Pierre Mathieu's 
Deplorable Death of Henry IV, with its accompanying Pane- 
gyric and Poem, which I take to contain a far-reaching 
explanation of the allegory of The Tempest; extracts from 
this book are given in Chapter xiv of the present work and 
in Appendix B. I intend to make it the subject for my next 
study and I should like to say that it will give the strongest 
corroborative evidence for the treatment of King Lear as 
symbolic mythology. 

L. WINSTANLEY. 



Aberystwyth, 1922 



CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTION 1-36 

^ CHAPTER I. The Subject of Macbeth and 

THE Union of the Crowns . . . 37-52 

CHAPTER II. The Gunpowder Plot, the 
Darnley Murder and the Massacre of 
St Bartholomew . . . . . 53-64 

CHAPTERS III AND IV. Macbeth and the 

Darnley Murder 65-93 

CHAPTER V. Macbeth and Francis, Earl 

Bothwell ....... 94-103 

^CHAPTER VI. The Witches in Macbeth and 

THE Scottish Witch-Trials . . . 104-115 

CHAPTER VII. Macbeth and the Massacre 

OF St Bartholomew 116-131 

CHAPTER VIII. The Porter Scene— Con- 
clusions 132-137 

CHAPTER IX. The Problem of King Lear . 138-145 

CHAPTERS X AND XI. King Lear and the 

Darnley Murder . . . . . 146-180 

CHAPTER XII. Bothwell and Edmund— 

Rizzio AND Oswald 181-191 

CHAPTERS XIII AND XIV. King Lear and 

St Bartholomew 192-222 

APPENDICES 223-225 

INDEX 227-228 



MACBETH, KING LEAR 

AND CONTEMPORARY HISTORY 
INTRODUCTION 

In a previous book entitled Hamlet and the Scottish Succession 
I endeavoured to show that a considerable proportion of the 
material employed in the play of Hamlet was really historical 
and political in origin. The book met with a larger degree 
of sympathy than I expected though it inevitably excited 
controversy. 

I propose in the present book to apply the same method 
to Macbeth and King Lear, i.e., I propose to consider these 
two plays in relation to contemporary history. 

My main assumption is that, as Shakespeare wrote the 
plays for a definite audience at a definite point of time, we 
cannot hope to understand them fully without asking first 
and foremost what they would mean for that audience. A 
dramatic poet appeals first and foremost to the mentality 
of his audience and it is through the mentality of his audience 
that his plays must consequently be interpreted. 

Shakespeare did not write for the men of the twentieth 
century or for the men of the nineteenth century ; he wrote 
for the men of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth 
centuries and thus the interpretation that the men of his 
own day would be likely to place upon his plays is exceed- 
ingly important. 

I should Hke to point out that the method is simply 
the endeavour to bring literary criticism up to date. All 

W. M. I 



2 Introduction 

criticism depends ultimately upon philosophy and many of 
our Shakespearean critics, whether they know it or not, are 
really arguing from a philosophy long since discredited ; thus 
their idea of time is very largely a Cartesian idea of time; 
according to which it is either non-existent or else so un- 
important that it is safe to ignore it. What else do they 
mean when they speak of Shakespeare as a " universal poet " 
in the sense of a poet who is equally intelligible to all ages 
and all periods of time and whose plays would therefore 
mean the same thing to the men of his own age and to the 
men of ours. Now to those of us who have studied Bergson 
this conception of the irrelevance and unimportance of time 
is quite impossible; we think of time or space-time as of a 
fundamental reality and of duration as the very stuff of life 
itself. 

The practical application in the sphere of criticism means 
that it is impossible to dissociate a poet from time and space 
and consider him simply as he is in the abstract. 

Yet this is what much of our Shakespearean criticism 
really does or attempts to do. Consider, for example, Mr 
Bradley's book on Shakespearean Tragedy which I only 
choose as an illustration because it represents the high- 
water-mark of its particular method. Mr Bradley makes a 
few incidental references to contemporary events but they 
are singularly few and unimportant ; so far as the main sub- 
stance of the plays is concerned Mr Bradley seems to see no 
connection whatever between them and the age in which 
they were written. He might, for all the connection he sees, 
have met them straying about loose in the age of Pericles 
or in the period of the Romantic Revival. 

The plays were written by an Englishman in the early 
seventeenth century. What is their relation to space-time, 
in other words, to England and the seventeenth century? 



Introduction 3 

It is inconceivable that any work can mean exactly the 
same for all men in all ages. 

Let me choose as a parallel case to the method I desire 
the Higher Criticism of the Bible. 

There was a time not so very long ago when the Bible 
was assumed to be equally true and equally intelligible for 
all men at all times and, as Ruskin puts the matter, it was 
so ordained by God in order that we might all understand 
it. Now this was a very simple and, granting the assumption 
of a Divine Author, a very logical way of regarding the 
matter. But let me point out that it was only logical in 
the case of a Divine Author for no other could be supposed 
to be so far above space and time. No educated person, 
however, now thinks of regarding the Bible in that way. 
The Higher Criticism has taught us to concern ourselves 
with each book of the Bible individually, to ask ourselves 
first and foremost at what date each book was written and 
under what circumstances and what it would mean for the 
men of that age. Now in the case of the Bible, if anywhere, 
it might be logical to divorce it from space and time ; but, the 
principle of relativity being accepted even there, what is 
there to hinder us from applying it in the case of Shakespeare? 
He cannot be more divine than the Bible? 

Now the moment we attempt to apply the principle of 
relativity to Shakespeare certain very important facts stand 
out: 

1. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans had no newspapers 
and were not allowed the right of discussing political affairs 
on the public platform. Consequently they expected the 
stage to play the part of both newspaper and platform. The 
stage of Shakespeare's day was continually and closely asso- 
ciated with politics. 

2. A rigorous censorship was exercised over the stage. It 

I — 3 



4 Introduction 

was forbidden to represent contemporary monarchs upon 
the stage even if they were represented in a favourable Hght. 
Any individual, whatever his rank, who found himself criti- 
cised upon the stage, could apply to the Court of Star 
Chamber for a veto, and such applications were frequent. 

Thus the dramatists had the strongest possible motives 
(a) for representing politics and contemporary history upon 
the stage, (b) for evading the censorship by representing 
their politics or history in some convenient disguise. 

In my previous book I pointed out that the method oi 
Hamlet in dealing with the Gonzago story (i.e. by altering 
it to adapt it more closely to the circumstances of his father's 
murder) was precisely the method the dramatists were ac- 
cused of employing in the case of Essex. 

3. Psychology also has its historical development and 
therefore the psychology of one age cannot exactly resemble 
the psychology of another. Anyone who wants to know what 
I mean by these differences can turn either to Mr Gregory 
Smith's analysis of Ben Jonson's psychology in his Life of 
Ben Jonson or to my own analysis of Spenser's psychology 
in my editions of the Faerie Qiieene (Bks. I and II). A reader 
who will refer to these will see that the psychology of both 
Spenser and Ben Jonson differs extraordinarily from that 
of the nineteenth century. Now, if we are going to interpret 
Shakespeare's plays by a psychological method, we ought 
surely to begin by explaining what his psychology really was. 
But neither Mr Bradley, nor any other Shakespearean critic 
known to me, does anything of the kind. 

One of my reviewers argued with me that, even if Shake- 
speare's psychology did differ from ours, it could only differ 
in unimportant details. But how does he know that, how 
can he know it, when in the case of Shakespeare's contem- 
poraries the differences are really profound? It has a very 



Introduction 5 

considerable practical bearing. Thus in my previous book 
I developed the thesis that many of the traits in Hamlet 
were drawn from James I and that others were drawn from 
Essex. It was objected that this was improbable. But why 
improbable? It was certainly the method of Spenser's psy- 
chology for he nearly always draws his leading characters 
from more originals than one. Now I do not for a moment 
argue that Shakespeare's psychology must, of necessity, re- 
semble Spenser's; but, when I find a specific instance in 
which there is good evidence that it does, I am hardly 
surprised. Personally I find the resemblances to be im- 
portant in practically every play and I find the method in 
Macbeth and King Lear, at any rate, to be very largely 
Spenser's, applied far more finely than he applies it, but 
still his method. 

4. The Elizabethans were not only men of the Renais- 
sance but they retained in their mentality a good deal of 
the Middle Ages and one custom inherited from the Middle 
Ages was their fondness for symbolism. This is again most 
obvious in Spenser whose Faerie Queene is one mass of 
symbolism ; but it is also very plain in some of Shakespeare's 
dramatic predecessors, for instance Lyly whose work is a 
kind of symbolic mythology. Spenser, I may remark, tells 
us himself that his mythology refers to contemporary events 
and M. Feuillerat^ certainly interprets Lyly's mythology in 
the same way. Everyone is, of course, aware that the 
mystery and miracle plays, which preceded Shakespeare's 
stage, were full of symbolism. Now should we not expect 
on a priori grounds to find a certain amount of symbolism 
in Shakespeare? Would it surprise us if there were a good 
deal? Let us observe, to begin with, that many of his tales 
are absurd and fantastic if taken literally; but would be 
^ See A. Feuillerat, John Lyly. 



6 Introduction 

admirable if taken symbolically. Mr Maurice Moscovitch, 
the Jewish actor who rendered the part of Shylock, told me 
that he found the story of the pound of flesh fundamentally 
absurd and could not understand why such splendour of 
character drawing should be associated with such absurdity 
of action. Now, judging the Merchant of Venice as literally 
interpreted, I can only say that I agree with Mr Moscovitch. 
But let us observe one fact ! The tale of the pound of flesh, 
though absurd if taken literally, is admirable as a symbol 
and in that way we employ it every day ; when we wish to 
speak of someone who insists on the whole of a cruelly hard 
bargain we speak of him as demanding his ''pound of flesh." 
Well! May not Shakespeare have meant it as a symbol 
from the beginning? I agree with Mr Maurice Mosco- 
vitch that, if taken literally, it is absurd; therefore I do 
not think it can ever have been intended to be taken 
literally. 

. Another instance which no one can help taking s3^mboli- 
cally is the ass's head applied to Bottom and Titania in love 
with Bottom so transformed. Here the symbolism is so 
obvious that no one can miss it and it is impossible to 
imagine that Shakespeare himself did not see it. The only 
questions are: Did he mean it to apply to the blindness of 
love in general? Or to some specific instance of the blindness 
of love? Or to some specific instance typifying something 
general? Surely it would be of interest to know the precise 
meaning of the symbol ; but I do not think that, in this case 
at least, anyone can doubt we have a symbol. Or select 
as another instance the character of Caliban? Is Caliban a 
figure in a fairy-tale? Or is he symbolic? If he is symbolic, 
what does he stand for? Once again let us observe that it is 
very easy to use him as a symbol. Thus Sir Paul Vinogradoff, 
wishing to describe the modern Bolshevik rule in Russia, 



Introduction 7 

describes it as the " rule of Caliban " and all is said ; we know 
at once what he means. 

Shakespeare's plays, as usually interpreted, form a singular 
mixture of baby-tales combined with some of the profoundest 
wisdom in the world ; as a rule we persist in taking the baby- 
tales seriously; but I believe that, when we do so, we 
greatly under-estimate Shakespeare's genius. I cannot, for 
my part, take literally things like the three caskets story 
or the pound of flesh story, or Bottom with the ass's head, 
or Lear's division of his kingdom, or Gloucester and Edgar 
in the precipice scene, or the trial of the joint-stools by Lear. 
The three last instances are particularly remarkable because 
they occur in the greatest of all Shakespeare's tragedies and 
because they are, as they stand, so palpably absurd. 

Hardly anyone denies the absurdity of Lear's division of 
his kingdom. But critics explain it by saying that Shake- 
speare found it in his source and did not trouble to alter it. 
This scarcely seems to me an explanation for the truth is, 
as I shall show later, that Shakespeare made it much more 
improbable than it is in the source. In any case the precipice 
scene and the trial of the joint-stools are equally improbable 
and Shakespeare did not find them in his source; he added 
them himself. 

I believe all three examples to be really symbolism ; I shall 
attempt to explain them in the following pages and I believe 
that when the true meaning is known it adds greatly to the 
horror and the tragedy of the drama. 

I wish to call attention here, however, to the following facts : 

[a) That symbolism is very frequent in Shakespeare's 
contemporaries. 

[h) That there are a great many scenes and characters in 
Shakespeare which can be used symbolically and which seem 
as if they were obviously meant as symbols. 



8 Introduction 

(c) It is more than possible that what seem absurdities in 
Shakespeare may be simply symbolic. 

5. In comparing Shakespeare's plays with contemporary 
history we must remember that the principle of relativity 
applies to the history itself and that it would not appear to 
contemporaries precisely as it appears to us. We must re- 
member that contemporaries estimate individuals much 
more passionately and very differently, that they admire 
them more, hate them more, see them in an aspect much 
more lurid or much more grand or with a pathos we cannot 
even imagine ; we must remember also that historic eVents, 
as seen by the eyes of contemporaries, are often curiously 
different from anything the modern historian imagines. 
Suppose, for example, that a modern historian were asked 
to represent the whole massacre of St Bartholomew in a 
single tableau or picture. Would he represent it as an old 
man naked in a thunderstorm? I cannot conceive that he 
would, but the French Huguenots (as I shall show later) 
certainly represented France suffering from St Bartholomew 
as an old man, exposed naked to the elements!^ They de- 
rived the idea from the terrible tragedy of Coligny. The old 
man was murdered, his naked body was exposed to aU the 
elements of air and water and fire, and in their French and 
Latin elegies the French Huguenots symbolise the massacre 
of St Bartholomew as a great thunderstorm sweeping the 
land, speak of Coligny as the father of his country exposed 
by his ungrateful children naked to the tempest and then 
proceed to identify Coligny with France itself. I shall quote 
the poems later which show different stages in the develop- 
ment of the idea^. The image, which seems so strange to 

^ Chap. XIV. 

2 Memoires de I'estat de France sous Charles IX, I ^j6. Anonymous, 
published by Heinrich Wolf, Meidelbourg; in Chap. xiv. 



Introduction 9 

us, was completely natural to the Huguenots themselves 
and it would be just as natural to any Englishman who 
sympathised with them and who knew their point of view. 

This, I may remark, is only typical. Symbolic views of 
history were common in the sixteenth and early seventeenth 
centuries. I have come across some works, purporting to 
be history, which were really symbolic interpretations 
throughout^. 

Let me recapitulate before proceeding further. If we 
study Shakespeare in close relation to his age the main 
points to be observed are : s^ 

(i) That the Elizabethans and Jacobeans had neither 
newspapers nor public platform and that the stage was 
expected to do duty for both, and hence the stage was con- 
tinuously and closely associated with politics. 

(2) That the censorship was very strict, even more strict 
than the law of libel is to-day, and therefore the dramatists 
were compelled to adopt some form of disguise. 

(3) That the psychology of the sixteenth century must 
differ, in many respects, from the psychology of the nine- 
teenth, and hence in interpreting Shakespeare we must be 
prepared for this difference. 

(4) That the men of the sixteenth century, alike in poetry 
and in drama, made a large use of symbolism and that we 
must therefore be prepared for the use of such symbolism 
in Shakespeare. 

(5) That it was the custom to represent contemporary 
history in symbolism and that such symbolism, as in the 
case of the Huguenot representation of St Bartholomew, is 
often exceedingly powerful and dramatic. 

Before proceeding, however, there are two questions 
which it is very pertinent to ask : 

^ P. Mathieu, Deplorable Death of Henry IV, etc., etc. 



10 Introduction 

{a) If there exists a real relation between Shakespeare's 
plays and the history of his time, has not this been suspected 
before? If so, why have modem critics not worked it out 
conclusively? 

(b) Did Shakespeare's contemporaries leave no explana- 
tions of his plays? If so, where are they and why have they 
so long been ignored? 

Let us deal first with (a). 

It is a fact that historical relations have not infrequently 
been suspected in Shakespeare's plays. Thus Malone fre- 
quently calls attention to historical parallels in Measure for 
Measure and elsewhere; it was, as a matter of fact, Malone's 
notes on Measure for Measure (a play I happened to be 
editing) which first called my own attention to the subject. 

Nor was Malone the only person who had previously per- 
ceived historical parallels in Shakespeare. Writing about a 
century ago Plumptre suspected a relation between the 
Darnley Murder and the murder of Hamlet's father ; George 
Russell French had also found a connection (as I pointed 
out in my book) between the maxims of Polonius and those 
of Lord Burleigh, Mr Abbott (whom again I quoted) sug- 
gested a similar parallel between Hamlet and Essex as the 
latter was in his evil days. Other critics, whom I need not 
quote here, had suggested historical parallels for various 
plays. 

It has even been suspected that Shakespeare's plays were 
a form of mythology; thusTieck believed that^ Midsummer- 
Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet 
were all essentially my thology and that they formed a trilogy. 

The truth appears to be that the older editors and critics 
of Shakespeare did, not infrequently, suspect a historical 
foundation for his plays ; but, though they suspected it, they 
were unable to prove it, and this for two reasons : 



Introduction ii 

(i) They had not sufficient historical material available. 
Even now the history of the Elizabethan period is most 
imperfectly studied. There is no detailed and continuous 
history between that of Froude which concludes with 1588 
and Gardiner who commences with 1603^. This means that 
the fifteen years most important for Shakespeare's de- 
velopment, and the years productive of a large number of 
important plays, are not covered by any detailed history 
whatever. Moreover there is a paucity even of good bio- 
graphies ; there are very few which are at all comprehensive 
and many men of eminence in the period have no bio- 
graphies. The materials my historical colleagues suggested 
to me as likely to be useful were the publications of the 
Camden Society, Maitland Club, etc., etc.. The State Papers, 
Venetian State Papers, Simancas Archives, etc., etc. Now, 
in the early nineteenth century, the Shakespearean student 
had no Froude, no Gardiner; he had not yet the researches 
of Mr Spedding, Mr Martin Hume, Mr Abbott, etc., etc. He 
had no Cambridge History. The Venetian State Papers had 
not yet been examined nor the Simancas ^^'c/^^V^s; our own 
Domestic and Foreign State Papers had not been published 
by the Record Office and many of the publications of our 
modern antiquarian societies were either inaccessible or at 
least very difficult of access. I still think that more use 
might have been made of such historical material as was 
available; but there was certainly very little. 

(2) The earlier students were hampered by the fact that 
there was no correct time-order for the plays. Let us assume, 
for the moment, that Shakespeare's plays are partly his- 
torical and that they usually refer (as I think they do) to 
events that for some reason or other are interesting to the 

^ See, however, Treason and Plot, by Martin Hume, a study of the 
last decade of Ehzabeth's reign. 



1' 



12 Introduction 

audience of that date. These events would, in some cases, 
be contemporary events as with the Lopez trial and Shylock; 
in other cases they would be events closely connected for 
some reason or other with contemporary events as the 
subject of the Darnley murder was closely connected with 
the accession of James I. It is obvious that, if the historical 
method of interpretation be possible at all, the correct date 
must be a clue of the very greatest value and, in many cases, 
an incorrect date might make the historical interpretation 
of the play totally impossible. Let me choose as an example 
The Tempest. This play has all the appearance of being 
some kind of allegory and attempts at such interpretation 
have frequently been made. But in the folio of 1623, The 
Tempest was placed first amongst Shakespeare's plays and 
this very naturally imbued the earlier editors and critics 
with the belief that it was one of the earliest. We now rank 
it among the latest and date it somewhere about 1610 or 
1611. 

Let us suppose for the sake of argument that The Tempest 
really is an historical allegory and relates to events occurring 
somewhere about 1610. In that case the earlier critics of 
Shakespeare who dated it between 1590 and 1595 could not 
possibly have interpreted it at all because the events referred 
to in the play would not then have taken place. I may 
remark incidentally that I have come across what I take 
to be a contemporary French interpretation of the allegory 
of The Tempest — a large part of it, at any rate — by the 
Historiographer-Royal of France and that he does interpret 
The Tempest as referring mainly to Henry IV of France^. 

Assuming for the moment that the Historiographer- 
Royal is right and that the play does refer to the later years 
of Henry IV of France, the earlier critics who dated it 
^ P. Mathieu, Deplorable Death of Henry IV. 



Introduction 13 

between 1590 and 1595 would be totally unable to interpret 
it correctly. Their task would be impossible. In fact the 
time-order of the plays and their approximate dates seem 
to me of the very first importance in determining their 
historical bearing. The truth, I repeat, is that the earlier 
students of Shakespeare often suspected a historical con- 
nection; but they had the utmost difficulty in proving it. 

I turn now to question (h) . 

Did Shakespeare's contemporaries leave no explanations 
of his plays and if so, where are they and why have they 
so long been ignored? 

The answer to this question is again twofold. 

(i) Shakespeare's contemporaries did leave explanations 
of, at any rate, some of his plays ; but the censorship made 
it difficult or impossible to explain them in full so we only 
find portions of the play given. 

(2) Since the plays are historical the explanation is usually 
made by professed historians or semi-historians who are 
ignored by our literary students because they do not suspect 
any connection between Shakespeare and the history of his 
own time. 

The example already given is that of Henry IV's Historio- 
grapher-Royal — P. Mathieu. In the book he wrote on the 
death of his master P. Mathieu certainly seems to me to 
interpret the allegory of three of Shakespeare's plays: As 
You Like It, the Gloucester part of King Lear and The 
Tempest, as referring to Henry IV of France, 

In this book I deal with P. Mathieu's interpretation of the 
Gloucester story in its proper place ^. If the Historiographer- 
Royal be right then Orlando in ^s You Like It, Edgar in 
King Lear and Prospero in The Tempest all refer, more or 
less, to Henry IV of France. I had already arrived at that 

1 Chap. XIV. 



J 



14 Introduction 

conclusion before finding P. Mathieu's book. I propose to 
deal with this problem at some future date. Here I only 
wish to point out that contemporary explanations of Shake- 
speare's plays do occasionally exist. No doubt more could 
be found if a careful search were made^. 

The reasons I have given suffice, I think, to explain why 
the historical method of interpreting Shakespeare's plays fell 
into disuse and why the psychological method took its place. 
Schlegel in Germany, Coleridge and Hazlitt in England, were 
among the chief expositors of this psychological method. 
It suited Coleridge exceptionally well. He had, as he himself 
confesses, hardly any historical interests; he was deeply 
interested in psychology and, as I have just explained, the 
historical material was not, in any case, available. Coleridge 
opened a new vein which proved exceedingly fruitful and 
was followed, as the leading method, for a century. 

At the same time there was one serious flaw in the psycho- 
logical method as usually practised, and it seems to me one 
of the most startling phenomena in the history of Shake- 
spearean criticism that no one, apparently, suspected it. It 
is the fact that, as I have already said, psychology also has 
its historical development. It surely ought to have been 
fairly obvious that the psychology of the sixteenth century 
was bound to be different from the psychology of the nine- 
teenth century and it surely ought to have been obvious 
that these differences might be important and, in any case, 
called for explanation. Several of my critics thought I was 
objecting to the psychological method in toto. This was very 
far from being the case. What I did object to was the 
method of those critics who assumed that the psychology 
of the sixteenth century was and must be identical with the 
psychology of the nineteenth and interpreted Shakespeare 
1 See also D'Aubigne's Les Tragiques in Chap. xiv. 



Introduction 15 

almost exactly as they would have inteq)reted Browning. 
Mr Bradley, for instance, interprets the characters of Hamlet 
and Ophelia, Lear and Macbeth almost precisely as he might 
interpret those of Guido Franceschini, Caponsacchi and 
Pompiha. It never even occurs to him that the method of 
constructing the characters might be radically different, and 
that the aim might be different. Spenser, to take a sixteenth 
century example, uses an individual to represent the genius 
of a whole country, thus Irena and Beige are characters in 
his poem and they signify Ireland and Belgium. He also 
employs characters who stand both for individuals in history 
and for the genius of a whole nation : as for instance Orgoglio 
and Mammon represent both Philip II of Spain and Spain 
itself. ^ 

What is more the method is congenial to the whole men- 
tality of the time, for the French Huguenots employ it in 
the poems they intersperse in their histories^. Coligny is 
himself and he is also the whole genius of France, naked in 
a tempest of hate; the Queen Joan of Navarre is herself; 
but she is also the daughter of France, repudiated for her 
truthfulness, disinherited for her truthfulness (i.e. as a 
Protestant), but none the less serving the fatherland to the 
last breath of her life. These instances from Spenser and 
from the anonymous Huguenots (I shall quote them more 
fully later) illustrate the exact process by which contem- 
porary history passed into a sort of symbolic mythology. 

Now just suppose for a moment that Shakespeare's psy- 
chology was that of his contemporaries. Might it not throw 
a strangely different light on King Lear} Is not the drama 
great enough to be the tragedy of a nation? Might it not be 
the scream of horror wrung from England's greatest genius 
as he interpreted the anguish of Civil War in France and 

1 Memoir es de I'estat de France sous Charles IX, Meidelbourg, 1576. 



1 6 Introduction 

feared (as did actually happen later) a civil war in his own 
country? 

Even Mr Bradley admits that King Lear produces an 
effect upon him closely resembling that of the Prometheus 
Vinctus of iEschylus and the Divina Commedia of Dante. 
Suppose that it were, like them, a piece of symbolic mytho- 
logy. Suppose that Shakespeare really did share the men- 
tality of his own contemporaries: the French Huguenots, 
Lyly and Spenser. Suppose that, as P. Mathieu's book 
seems to suggest, Shakespeare's plays really were symbolic 
mythology. Why not? A man really does share the ideas 
of his own era. A great poet really is a portion of his own 
age. It is not enough to say of any author that his method 
is "psychological " ; psychology is itself relative to the period 
in which it occurs. 

The psychology of the twentieth century already differs 
greatly from the psychology of the nineteenth and is giving 
rise, in France, to a new kind of literature ; the authors call 
themselves " unanimistes " and they try to interpret what 
they call the "psychology of crowds." 

The same argument holds with regard to the past, but 
in still more accentuated form. 

Ben Jonson cannot be judged as if he were George Eliot. 
Neither is Spenser's method the same as Browning's. In 
The Ring and the Book, for example. Browning aims at 
drawing actual living human beings and one character stands 
for one character; Pompilia is an individual Italian girl and 
she is Pompilia ; Guido is a vicious Italian noble, Caponsacchi 
is an Italian priest, etc., etc. 

We should be very much mistaken, however, if we tried 
to interpret Spenser by such means. 

To begin with Spenser's characters are all, in the strict 
sense, superhuman. Like Aristotle (from whom he learnt so 



Introduction 17 

much) he beheves that the hero should be greater than Ufe. 
All his heroes and heroines are really superhuman ; they are 
not portraits, but still less are they fiction; thus the deeds 
of Artegall are composed of the deeds of Arthur, Lord Grey 
of Wilton and Lord Leicester; Duessa, again, is a figure of 
superhuman wickedness and includes both Mary Tudor and 
Mary, Queen of Scots. Una is a figure of superhuman beauty 
and includes something of Anne Boleyn and much of 
Elizabeth. 

Now let us ask ourselves the question: Why should 
Shakespeare's psychology resemble Browning's more than 
it resembles Spenser's? Let us remember that Spenser's 
psychology is completely in accord with the genius of his 
own age. We can actually see the contemporary historians 
at work turning the history of their own times into a sort 
of symbolic mythology. Thus the anonymous Huguenots 
regard Coligny as Coligny and also as the genius of France, 
robbed of all by his own ungrateful children i. P. Mathieu 
regards Henry IV as Henry IV and also as the genius of 
France, assuaging all her discords by the music attendant 
upon his personality. 

P. Mathieu also says that the genius of France was so 
obsessed with folly that he chose his false and illegitimate 
son (Guise) and cast out his legitimate son (Navarre). In 
his own blindness and despair the genius of France was 
about to destroy himself ; but the son whom he had disowned, 
entirely loyal in his misfortune, saved him from destruction. 
Here again surely we have a piece of symbolic mythology 
that closely resembles Shakespeare P^ 

Our modern method of interpreting Shakespeare's psy- 
chology almost entirely as if it were Browning's results in 
some startling discrepancies and what I can only call much 
^ Chap. XIV. 2 Chap. xiv. 

W. M. 2 



1 8 Introduction 

"ploughing of the sand." Consider, for example, what Mr 

J. M. Robertson says of Hamlet: 

There is no better illustration of the need for a study of the 
genesis of the Shakespeare plays than the endless discussion of 
the aesthetic problem of Hamlet. It has continued for two 
centuries, latterly with the constant pre-occupation of finding 
a formula which shall reduce the play to aesthetic consistency ; 
and every solution in its turn does but disregard some of the 
data which have motived the others. 

Mr J. M. Robertson gives in his book The Problem of 
Hamlet the leading formulae developed by eminent critics 
and has no difficulty whatever in showing how extra- 
ordinarily different and how mutually contradictory they 
are. 

But surely, if the attempt to interpret the character of 
Hamlet as an "aesthetic consistency" has simply resulted 
in two centuries of contradiction (as Mr Robertson asserts), 
there must be something wrong in the method of interpre- 
tation? That something wrong quite possibly lies in our 
ignoring of Shakespeare's own age and the psychology of 
Shakespeare's own age. 

Now, in my previous book, Hamlet and the Scottish Suc- 
cession, I endeavoured to show that Shakespeare's material 
was really historical, that what he was really endeavouring 
to do in Hamlet was to reflect in dramatic form the events 
most immediately interesting alike to his audience and to 
himself. His hero, so I believed, was never intended to be 
a psychological unity in our sense of the term; he was, 
probably, like the great figures of Spenser, essentially super- 
human and, like them also, his traits were composed from 
more than one individual. 

I found in him elements drawn both from James I and 
from Essex in the latter's tragic later years and I was not 
surprised to find Spenser's method, the method of symbolic 



Introduction 19 

mythology, represented in Shakespeare because I knew 
Spenser's method to be^so completely in accord with the 
mentality of the whole era. 

Let us ask ourselves very carefully one question : Do not 
Shakespeare's greatest figures produce the impression of 
being larger than life? To me, at least, they certainly do. 
I feel that Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear and Prospero are all 
essentially creatures greater than any individual man. And, 
if Shakespeare were deliberately making figures greater than 
life-size, he was only in accord with the whole tradition of 
his time. The religious drama which preceded him dealt 
with beings who were usually superhuman; some of them 
were altogether supernatural, most of them were super- 
naturally inspired; neither the mystery play nor the morality 
dealt with ordinary human beings, of ordinary stature. If 
Shakespeare were acquainted with the classical drama (and 
he must surely have known something of it) he would find 
gods and demi-gods playing a large part in that drama. If 
he knew something of Aristotle (and he probably did) he 
would find in Aristotle's Poetics the statement that the 
tragic hero is greater than life. And then there was, as I 
have just shown, the practice of Spenser who draws his data 
from real life but who carefully constructs a world which is 
greater than real life. 

At any rate one thing is certain; that, as Mr Robertson 
has (so I think) conclusively shown, no psychological inter- 
pretation ever has been found for Hamlet which does not 
contradict some interpretation with data equally good. I 
doubt if the men of the sixteenth century would have known 
what we mean by a "psychological unity"; it seems to me 
they were aiming at something totally different. 

A distinguished scholar who agreed with much in my view 
of Hamlet told me that he found it difficult to believe that 

2 — 2 



20 Introduction 

the Elizabethans took so much interest in history as my 
theory, taken as a whole, implied.. 

My answer to that is twofold. 

In the first place we have very strong evidence that the 
Elizabethans did take a great interest in history. They had 
a whole series of chroniclers such as Hall, Hohnshed, 
Fabyan and Stowe ; they had great antiquaries — Camden for 
example ; some of their chief poets, the authors of The Mirror 
for Magistrates, Spenser, Drayton and Daniel, all employed 
material which was largely historical; on the stage the 
chronicle play and the historical play were among the most 
popular of all forms. 

The long series of Shakespeare's historical dramas is itself 
sufficient to prove that he shared this passion to its fullest 
possible extent. 

Dr Ward^ has even suggested that the pecuhar greatness 
of Elizabethan drama may be due to its intimate and close 
connection with British history 2. 

The second part of my answer is that we have the strongest 
evidence that the stage dealt with contemporary history. 

As I have shown in my previous book, when Essex and 
Southampton were tried for their lives it was one of the 
counts of the indictment against them that they had made 
a political use of the stage, and the company involved was 
Shakespeare's company and the play involved was one of 
Shakespeare's plays, i.e. Richard II. 

The prosecutions of the Star Chamber are alone sufficient 
to prove that the authorities suspected the Elizabethan 
stage of being continually and closely associated with 
politics. 

Moreover, since it was illegal to represent any contem- 
porary Christian monarch upon the stage, they were thus 

1 Now Sir Adolphus W. Ward. 2 English Dramatic Literature, p. 218. 



Introduction 21 

compelled to use some form of disguise. Also, as I have 
tried to show, the dramatic form itself necessitated a good 
deal of concentration, which concentration involved a re- 
shaping of the historical material. 

In my previous book I have given a number of testimonies 
to prove the close connection between the stage and Eliza- 
bethan and Jacobean contemporary history. I will add a 
few further testimonies here. 

A certain number of dramatists, Marlowe and Chapman 
among them, brought contemporary history quite openly 
on the stage. Thus Marlowe wrote The Massacre of Paris 
concerning which Dr Ward says : 

Its chief interest for us may be said to consist in considera- 
tions of historical rather than of literary interest. It certainly 
shows what an English Protestant of Marlowe's fervid type 
thought — even when the lapse of ten years or so had cooled 
down the first glow of indignant wrath excited by the event — 
of the Massacre, its authors and abettors and the principal 
personages of French and European political life whom it con- 
cerned; or, at least, it shows what view on these matters he 
thought would be acceptable to an English popular audience i. 

There was also a play by Webster entitled The Guise 
which is non-extant 2. 

We have, again. Chapman's remarkable series of plays 
dealing with French history; the two tragedies Bussy 
d'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy, the first appearing in 
1607, the scene being laid at the court of Henry III of 
France who was himself introduced into the action together 
with the Duke of Anjou and the Duke of Guise. The Revenge 
deals with a continuation of the same subject. Also based 
on French history are The Conspiracie and the Tragedy of 
Charles, Duke of Byron, Marshall of France, which were 

1 English Dramatic Literature, p. 355. 

2 Others by Shirley and Dryden. Ibid. p. 355. 



22 Introduction 

printed in 1608 and dealt with comparatively recent events, 
the execution of Byron having taken place in 1602. 

It was, of course, a very daring proceeding to represent 
French history so nakedly on the boards, and the French 
Ambassador protested against the introduction of his royal 
master — Henry IV — upon the stage even though in a compli- 
mentary light, because of the ordinance forbidding on the 
stage the representation of "any modern Christian king^." 

The Thierry and Theodoret of Beaumont and Fletcher is 
another play supposed to contain numerous references to 
French contemporary history and Dr Ward thinks it possible 
that the play was a general satire on the regency of Mar}^ 
de Medici^. Dramatists, very naturally, did not limit them- 
selves to France. They were still more desirous to bring 
on the stage references to contemporary events in their own 
country and were continually suspected of having done so, 
sometimes, no doubt, unjustly, but often with disastrous 
results to themselves. Ben Jonson's Sejanus was generally 
supposed to have been, in part at any rate, a plea for Essex ; 
it certainly appears to me to be a satire on the methods of 
obtaining evidence employed in the Essex trial. 

Ben Jonson and Chapman together made reflections on 
the Scots in the play of Eastward Hoe ; several passages gave 
great offence to Sir James Murray and the authors were 
arrested. Jonson's own account was that they were in 
danger of mutilation, of having "their ears cut and noses." 
Ben Jonson and Chapman were once more imprisoned in 
1605 on account of " a play " of name and contents unknown. 

Still more audacious was Middleton's A game of Chess in 
which, says Dr Ward : 

Middleton ventured to bring on the popular stage more or 
less veiled representations of the highest personages in the 

^ English Dramatic Literature, p. 422. ^ Ibid. p. 690. 



Introduction 23 

realm, as well as of a foreign sovereign with whom King 
James I had long desired to enter into a more intimate under- 
standing i. 

Miss Sheavyn, in her chapter on "Authors and Official 
Censors 2," gives some startling examples of the way in 
which the stage was censored. I could quote much, but I 
will limit myself to one passage : 

The most innocent allusion to current politics was tabooed 
by a government which knew itself to be menaced by secret 
enemies on every side.... The nature of the political opinions 
expressed was not the sole ground of condemnation ; the offence 
lay in publisliing any opinions upon matters which the Crown 
considered out of the legitimate range of the subject's criti- 
cism Drama was especially open to criticism, as offering ex- 
ceptional chances of working upon popular feeling. During the 
last years of the Hfe of the turbulent favourite Essex, and those 
immediately following his execution, the authorities were un- 
usually sensitive. Jonson's Sejanus and Daniel's Philotas both 
brought trouble upon their authors, being construed as ex- 
pressions of sympathy with Essex. 

Nor was Shakespeare, in this respect, unlike other drama- 
tists; if Lyly, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Chapman, Middleton 
and Daniel all desired to allude to political matters, Shake- 
speare certainly did the same : 

"In Henry V," says Dr Ward, "acted at the Globe Theatre 
in 1599, Shakespeare referred with sympathetic emphasis to 
Essex.... Irish Expedition then in progress.... The references to 
the Essex plot in Henry VIII hardly admit of doubt," 

As I have shown before Henry IV and Richard 11^ had 
both, undoubtedly, political connections. And now let me 
sum up before proceeding. 

The principal points to observe are these : 

(i) Shakespeare's earlier editors and critics did frequently 

^ English Dramatic Literature, p. 497, etc. 

2 The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, pp. 524-536. 

^ Hamlet and the Scottish Succession. 



24 Introduction 

suspect a historical foundation for portions, at any rate, of 
his plays. 

(2) A historical interpretation was, however, hindered by 
the fact that, in the early nineteenth century, very little 
historical material was available. The history of the Eliza- 
bethan period is, even now, comparatively little studied. 

(3) The earlier critics had what we now know to be a 
wrong time-order for the plays and this must have greatly 
hindered the application of what historical material they 
possessed. 

(4) The extreme difficulty of applying a historical method 
explains why for so long a psychological method of study 
was preferred as being the only method available. 

(5) This psychological method was, however, applied too 
indiscriminately because no allowance was made for the 
inevitable differences between the psychology of the six- 
teenth century and that of the nineteenth. 

(6) The psychology of Spenser — Shakespeare's greatest 
contemporary — as applied in his poem, differs very greatly 
from that of any nineteenth century author; it is, however, 
closely in accord with the historical writing of the age; 
Spenser employs a kind of symbolic mythology and con- 
temporary history easily passes into just such a symbolic 
mythology. 

(7) There is much in Shakespeare which closely resembles 
such symbolic mythology and it is more than possible, since 
it is closely in accord with the spirit of his age, that he also 
emplo3^s it. 

(8) The Elizabethan and Jacobean stage was closely asso- 
ciated with politics. Many of the dramatists — Lyly, Marlowe, 
Chapman, Ben Jonson, Middleton, Daniel, etc. — are known 
to have produced political plays or to have been prosecuted 
for political reasons, 



Introduction 25 

(9) Shakespeare's own company was twice involved in 
political difficulties on account of Shakespeare's own plays 
and, when Essex and Southampton were tried for their lives, 
one of the indictments against them was that they had em- 
ployed Shakespeare's company for political purposes. 

(10) The Elizabethans were accustomed to a stage which 
in the miracle and mystery plays, and in Lyly, dealt with 
the symbolic, and Lyly had certainly used this symbolism 
to express contemporary politics^. 

Now in my previous book I endeavoured to study the 
play of Hamlet from the point of view of the Elizabethan 
audience and to make out, as exactly as I could, what it 
would mean for them. In this book I shall endeavour to 
perform the same task for Macbeth and King Lear. 

In both I arrive at the same conclusion that Shakespeare 
is employing in these plays a large element of contemporary 
history, that in each case it was history which had a close 
and relevant connection with immediate events. 

I cannot myself see that there is anything improbable in 
supposing that Shakespeare wrote about the events which 
interested him most. 

Moreover, since he was a popular dramatist of very great 
appeal, he would probably write about the things which 
interested his audience most. Why should he not? 

Assuming the ordinary method of interpretation to be 
correct it has always seemed to me difficult to understand 
why Shakespeare's tragedies should ever have achieved so 
profound and dreadful an intensity. What was there in 
their subjects to suggest such dreadful and painful emotion? 

Hamlet deals with a tale of early Denmark, not con- 
ceivably of any great interest to the poet or his audience; 
moreover the original (as I have shown before) is an entirely 
1 A. Feuillerat, John Lyly. 



26 Introduction 

different story; The Amleth saga might almost be headed 
"The Triumph of the Iron Will"; Amleth is remarkable 
mainly for his iron will ; against the most formidable odds 
he succeeds in avenging his father's murder, in making a 
most successful marriage and in gaining for himself the 
crown. Now, why should Shakespeare take this story, turn 
it inside out and then get so passionately interested in the 
result? I can understand anybody being interested in "The 
Triumph of the Iron Will" because it really is a fine subject, 
but it is the exact opposite of Shakespeare's subject which 
is much rather, as everybody has seen, the tragedy of the 
weak will. '^ 

The case is quite as peculiar or even more peculiar with 
regard to King Lear. It is admitted to be one of the world's 
greatest tragedies; the intensity of passion which sobs 
through it is like nothing else conceivable by the human 
mind ; it is a wail of the utmost imaginable human suffering, 
a scream of the intensest possible human pain. And all 
about what? About the domestic affairs of a remote king 
of the bronze age whose tale in the original was not a 
tragedy at all. This again is the crucial point. Shake- 
speare has turned it inside out just as he did with the 
Amleth story. 

In the original tale Cordelia succeeds in rescuing her 
father. Lear is restored to his throne and reigns happily 
till his death. This is the outline of the story as we find it 
in all Shakespeare's predecessors, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 
Holinshed, Spenser, etc., and to most of them it seems to 
possess but a languid and tepid interest, an antiquarian 
interest purely, one would judge, from their manner. Note, 
however, that it was conceived of as quite genuine history 
and as a really veracious happening. 

Now why should Shakespeare do anything so extraor- 



Introduction 27 

dinary? He takes the domestic affairs of a remote king of 
the bronze age which possess an interest mainly antiquarian, 
he then alters them completely, notwithstanding the fact 
that they are regarded as veracious history, he turns the 
story inside out and then writes the most terrific and moving 
of all modern tragedies on the result. Now why? Is not 
this improbable? Why should this tale, only of antiquarian 
interest to Shakespeare's own generation, in the original not 
a tragedy at all, why should this tale move Shakespeare 
with an intensity so appalling? I simply cannot conceive 
that it does. It is something else which moves him and I 
want to find out what. 

Now in my previous book I endeavoured to show that, in 
the case of Hamlet, Shakespeare was really dealing with 
contemporarj^ history and that the true reason he wrote with 
such terrible intensity was because, in all probability, he 
felt with such intensity. 

In this book I shall endeavour to show that the same 
thing holds true both of Macbeth and of King Lear and that 
the real reason why Shakespeare wrote with such a great, 
with such a terrific, such an appalling intensity was, in all 
human probability, because he felt with such an intensity, 
because his real subject possessed for him a great, a terrible 
and even an appalling interest. He terrifies us because he 
was himself terrified, he tears us with compassion because 
he was himself torn with compassion, he fills us with horror 
because he was himself shuddering in every nerve. 

I simply cannot conceive of dramas of such intensity 
written about early Scotland or the remote bronze age. The 
human mind does not work with that appalling vehemence 
when it is dealing with the affairs of the bronze age. I cannot 
conceive a man writing such a tragedy as King Lear unless 
he was most vitally and most painfully interested in the 



\^ 



28 Introduction 

subject and I cannot understand why, on the ordinary 
interpretation, Shakespeare had any reason to be either. 

I propose now to apply the new method to Macbeth and 
to King Lear and to see what hght a study of historical and 
political relationships throws upon these plays. I hope to 
show in the case of Macbeth : 

(i) That the play has a definite relation to the political 
situation at the time it was written, and the theme was 
probably suggested by the Gunpowder Plot which was sup- 
posed to be aimed {a) at the Protestant Ruler of Britain, 
(b) at the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland^' ^. 

(2) That the actual story of the hero — Macbeth — has a 
definite bearing on the subject of the Union of the Crowns 
since Macbeth was the person who tried to avert the Merlin 
prophecies and, by trying to avert, fulfilled them 3. James I 
was greatly interested in prophecy, especially in prophecies 
concerning his own career, and such a theme would have 
been most suitable to represent before him. It was also of 
the greatest possible interest to an English audience because 
the Union of the Crowns was then the burning subject of 
practical politics. 

(3) That the Gunpowder Plot was compared by James 
himself to the very similar plot against his father: i.e. the 
Darnley murder, and hence that both Shakespeare himself 
and his audience had been recently and painfully reminded 
of the Darnley murder*. 

(4) That James I dreaded a repetition of his father's fate 
and that the populace dreaded it for him*. 

(5) That the murder of Duff by Donwald (which gives 
the central episode in Macbeth) is quoted by at least two 
contemporary historians^ as the nearest parallel to the 

1 Gardiner. ^ Chap. i. ' Chap. i. 

* Chap. II. ^ Belleforest and Adam Blackwood. 



Introduction 29 

Darnley murder to be found in the annals of Scotland. Now 
the murder of Duff by Donwald is introduced by Shake- 
speare (wholly out of its place in Holinshed) into the midst 
of a totally different reign — the reign of Macbeth, and he 
probably misplaced it in this way because he wished to 
depict on the stage a close parallel to the Darnley murder i. 

(6) That Shakespeare modifies the account of the murder 
of Duff by Donwald so as to make it much more closely 
resemble the Darnley murder, that certain details appear 
to have been taken from Buchanan's Detection and the 
Oration appended and certain others from the actual de- 
positions at the trial^. 

{7) That the character and practices of Macbeth bear 
very close resemblances to the character and practices of 
Francis, Earl Bothwell — the half-mad Stuart cousin of 
James I, who pursued the king's life by means of witch- 
craft, who tried to obtain prophecies of his death by means 
of witchcraft, who consorted with outlaws and broken men 
and who was both condemned and excommunicated for 
practising with witchcraft^. 

(8) That the Macbeth of Shakespeare far more closely 
resembles Francis, Earl Bothwell than he resembles the 
Macbeth of Holinshed^. 

(9) That the details of the witch scenes in Macbeth can 
all be most closely paralleled by details of the actual Scottish 
witch-trials in several of which James himself took part and 
the majority of which were supposed to be aimed directly 
against his life*. 

(10) That James I all his life believed himself specially 

1 Chap. II. 2 Chaps, iii and iv. 

2 Scottish State Papers and Pitcairn's Ancient Scottish Criminal 
Trials, in Chap. v. 

* Scottish State Papers, Proclamations and Criminal Trials, in 
Chap. VI. 



30 Introduction 

persecuted by the powers of evil, witches, wizards and 
nefarious spirits — led and instructed by Satan in person 
because he — the king — was the destined and prophesied heir 
to a restored Arthurian Empire and a united Protestant 
Britain^. 

(ii) That the Privy Council of Scotland believed that 
the Gunpowder Plot itself was planned by the evil spirits of 
Scotland (directly inspired by Satan) and wrote James a 
congratulatory letter on his escape from the said Satanic 
plot 2. 

(12) That the Gunpowder Plot was compared by the 
people of England at large to the massacre of St Bartho- 
lomew and that the populace feared a similar massacre of 
Protestants in England^. 

(13) That the play of Macbeth contains a number of details 
not to be found in Holinshed but closely resembling details 
of St Bartholomew, especially of the Coligny murder*. 

(14) That much in the study of Macbeth himself re- 
sembles the remorse and terror and hallucinations which 
are said by contemporary French historians^ to have haunted 
Charles IX *. 

(15) That the whole play of Macbeth has thus a definite 
and close relation to the personal history of James I (before 
whom we know it to have been performed) and to those 
historical events, i.e. the Darnley murder and the massacre 
of St Bartholomew, which were then powerfully occupying 
the minds of the king and the audience because of the 
supposed resemblance of both to the recent Gunpowder 
Plot. 

^ Scottish State Papers, Proclamations and Criminal Trials, in 
Chap. VI. 

2 Chap. I. 3 Chap. 11. * Chap. vii. 

^ De Thou and D'Aubigne, also Memoires de I'estat de France sous 
Charles IX. 



Introduction 31 

In other words I think that Shakespeare, in writing 
Macbeth, was appealing just precisely to that complex of 
emotions which happened at the time to be uppermost in 
the minds of the king and populace. 

Gunpowder Plot appears to us to have been an abortive 
and a not very serious conspiracy. It did not so appear to 
the men of that age. It terrified the king because his father 
had been destroyed by a very similar plot and because he 
was reminded of all the agonising details of his father's 
murder: it terrified the English people because a dreadful 
massacre of Protestants (only too well remembered) had 
actually occurred in France. The plot also was aimed par- 
ticularly at the Union of the Crowns and therefore threatened 
the whole future of the British Empire which the king 
himself, and possibly the people, believed to have been 
divinely planned and brought about to counteract the in- 
fluence of Spain and the Pope in earthly affairs. Moreover 
both the king and his Scottish Privy Council believed 
that he had all his life been the object of persecution 
by witchcraft and that this crime of Gunpowder Plot 
also resulted from the direct intervention of the same evil 
spirits. Macbeth is a drama ideally calculated to appeal to 
this peculiar complex of emotions. It is also more than 
probable that Shakespeare felt this complex of emotions 
himself and was therefore writing of what interested him 
most. 

In the case of King Lear I hope to show: 

(i) That, as the drama belongs to the same period as 

Macbeth so also does it appeal to the same complex of 

emotions as Macbeth. 

(2) That a large portion of King Lear is derived from the 

story of the Darnley murder, especially as narrated by 



>J 



32 Introduction 

Buchanan^, anJ that another large portion is derived from 
the story of St Bartholomew, the death of Coligny and the 
Civil Wars in France as told by contemporary French 
historians, more particularly the Huguenots ^. 

(3) That these two crimes had already been united and 
told as one story by the Huguenots^ who considered that 
both were due to the machinations of the Catholic League 
and were the crimes of the House of Lorraine. The Darnley 
murder, a full account of it as a crime of the House of 
Lorraine, had already been inserted by these historians into 
the midst of the affairs of France. 

(4) That the Darnley murder was generally described 
as a "parricide" and that the murder of Coligny was 
described by contemporary historians as " the greatest parri- 
cide in history." Both have thus obvious affinities with 
King Lear which is certainly the greatest parricide in 
literature*. 

(5) That Darnley held the title of king; that, in spite of 
his sub- ordinate position, he passionately desired the power 
of a kir g, and that he was bitterly humiliated because he 
was not treated as a king^. 

(6) That Buchanan and the author of the Oration accuse 

Mary, Queen of Scots, of hating the king who, all the time, 

deeply loved her and only desired her society ; of repeatedly 

repulsing iiim wt'Cn he rode with a train to follow her; of 

giving orders to the Earl of Murray's wife to repulse him ; 

of robbing him of all resources and depriving him of his 

servants; of turning him out "naked" in inclement weather; 

of forcing him to take refuge in a broken-down and poverty- 

^ Chaps. X and xi. 

2 Menioires de I'estat de France sous Charles IX , Pierre Mathieu, 
Deplorable Death of Henry IV; D'Aubigne, Les Trc.giques. 
^ Memoires. * Chap. x. 

^ Scottish State Papers, in Chap. x. 



Introduction 33 

stricken hovel where he had only beggars for his consorts ; 
of condemning him to wander, cast off and forsaken 
by all, deprived of necessities, on the wild heaths of 
Scotland^. 

(7) That the love-story of Edmund and his wooing of the 
two sisters — Goneril and Regan — is almost exactly like the 
story of Bothwell in relation to Mary, Queen of Scots, and 
his own wife — Lady Bothwell, as told by Buchanan and the 
author of the Oration'^. 

(8) That both Mary and Bothwell's wife wrote love-letters 
to him in rivalry, that they were intensely jealous of each 
other, and that Mary was suspected of having poisoned 
Bothwell's wife^. 

(9) That Bothwell wished it to be believed that Darnley 
had perished in a thunderstorm and that his clothes had 
been stripped from him by lightning*. 

(10) That the Huguenot historians describe Coligny as 
the "father" of his country, betrayed by his excessive trust 
in his ungrateful children^. 

(11) That Coligny was termed "father" by the royal 
family of France who flattered him grossly, professed the 
greatest possible reverence for him and murdered him. That 
the Queen Joan of Navarre was termed "Sister" by the 
same royal family of France; but that she saw through 
their flatteries and had no trust in them^. 

(12) That Coligny's dead body was exposed to the most 
frightful outrages : thrown in the Seine, hanged on a gallows, 
a fire lit beneath, and that the Huguenot historians in their 
elegies represent this by saying that the father of his country 

1 Chap. XI. 2 Chap. xii. 

3 English State Papers, Foreign Series, in Chap. xii. 

* Melville's Memoirs, in Chap. x. 

^ Memoires de I'estat de France sous Charles IX, in Chap. xiv. 

^ Chap. xiii. 

w. M. 3 



34 Introduction 

was exposed by his ungrateful children naked to the ele- 
ments of fire, air and water^. 

(13) That the Huguenots further identify CoHgny with 
France itself and St Bartholomew with a tempest which is 
both thunderstorm and hurricane ; they identify the outrages 
heaped on the naked body of Coligny with the sufferings of 
France exposed naked to the thunderstorm and hurricane 
of St Bartholomew^. 

(14) That the Huguenots describe (in their poems) Queen 
Joan of Navarre as the true and loyal daughter of her 
country, who could not flatter the royal family of France, 
who was repudiated for her truthfulness (i.e., because she 
persisted in keeping to the Protestant faith), who was dis- 
inherited for her truthfulness (i.e., because of the excom- 
munication depriving her of her kingdom) and who, none 
the less, served her fatherland to her last breath and was 
murdered in serving it 2. 

(15) That P. Mathieu, the Historiographer-Royal of 
Henry of Navarre, describes his master as the legitimate 
and loyal son of France whom France repudiated in favour 
of the illegitimate and disloyal son (Guise); none the less 
Henry served his fatherland, through many privations, 
generously and forgivingly and, when his fatherland in blind- 
ness would have cast itself to destruction, he rescued it^. 

The truth appears to me to be that a good many of the 
historians of Shakespeare's age: Buchanan, the writer of 
the Oration, P. Mathieu, the French Huguenots, de Thou, 
D'Aubigne, naturally thought in a kind of symbolic mytho- 
logy. We cannot take quite literally Buchanan's repeated 
assertion that Darnley was turned "naked out of doors," 
robbed of his servants, and turned out to take refuge in a 

^ Memoires de I'estat de France sous Charles IX, in Chap. xiv. 

2 Chaps. XIII and xiv. 

3 Deplorable Death of Henry IV, in Chap. xiv. 



Introduction 35 

hovel with beggars or to wander " naked " on the wild heaths 
of Scotland. These things are not literally true, but they 
express what Buchanan thought the essence of the situa- 
tion ; they are magnificently dramatic and they would, quite 
easily and quite naturally, be employed on the stage. 

Similarly it is not literally true to say that Joan of Navarre 
was repudiated and disinherited by her fatherland for her 
truthfulness, that none the less she served it to her last 
breath and was murdered while serving it. Yet this is the 
way the Huguenots perceived the essence of the subject, 
and this again is magnificent drama. 

Again it is not literally true to say that Coligny was the 
father of his country, that he perished through implicit trust 
in his ungrateful children and through his blind confidence 
in their flatteries, that they exposed his naked body to a 
storm which was both a thunderstorm and a hurricane. Yet 
this was the way the Huguenots envisaged the central 
situation of St Bartholomew and it is magnificently dramatic. 

Let us also notice the way in which contemporaries tend 
to concentrate on one or two figures, in dramatic fashion, 
and ignore the rest. 

Read the actual depositions of the repeated trials for the 
Darnley murder and you will see what a large number of 
people were concerned, but Buchanan and the Oration con- 
centrate all their attention upon two — Mary and Bothwell — 
their lonely colloquy before the murder and the knocking 
on the door which roused Bothwell from his bed. 

So, if we read an account of St Bartholomew in a modern 
historian, we find it to be a maze crowded with hundreds of 
characters; but let us read the Huguenot elegies and two 
figures stand out like colossal statues against a terrific sky ; 
one is Coligny, the heroic father of his country, flattered by 



36 Introduction 

his unscrupulous children, trusting them implicitly, rejecting 
the advice of his most faithful friends and betrayed to a 
doom at which the world shuddered: a glorious creature 
ruined by his own excess of trust. The other is the figure 
of Joan of Navarre, repudiated for her truthfulness, dis- 
inherited for her truthfulness yet utterly faithful and loyal. 
And these two figures are bound together by a bond of 
unswerving loyalty on the woman's part and the deepest 
personal affection in both. The truthfulness of Joan of 
Navarre is always contrasted with the false flattery of 
Catherine de Medici and Marguerite. 

And just in the same way Mathieu sees the younger 
generation, as it were, embodied in Henry of Navarre, sees 
him as repudiated and as a fugitive most unjustly set aside, 
sees him also as "naked" and yet unflinchingly loyal in 
spite of outrage and poverty and, in the end, saving both 
himself and his fatherland. 

I cannot but say that I think such subjects as these fitting 
subjects for Shakespeare's supreme art. I can find nothing 
great enough to be the subjects of dramas like Hamlet and 
Macbeth and King Lear, except the fate of nations and the 
fate of the world, and that is what I think they essentially 
are and I maintain that, interpreting them by the mentality 
of their own age, we certainly find them such. 

In the ordinary interpretation I find Lear's division of his 
kingdom to be a mere baby-tale, quite unworthy to be the 
starting-point of the most terrific of tragic dramas; but if 
it typifies the divisions of France in the Civil Wars and the 
fatal blindness and rashness which led to those divisions, 
then I think it quite worthy of the supreme drama which 
follows. 

The reader, however, can study the evidence and judge 
for himself; to me it appears conclusive. 



CHAPTER I 

THE SUBJECT OF MACBETH AND THE 
UNION OF THE CROWNS 

The general consensus of opinion is that Macbeth was written 
somewhere about the year 1606. Mr Boas states the case 
as follows^: 

The play first appeared in the folios of 1623. It must, how- 
ever, be at least earUer than April 20th, 1610, for on that day 
Dr Forman saw it performed at the Globe and recorded the 
main outlines in his Diary. On the other hand it must be later 
than the accession of James I in March, 1603, for a number of 
passages were evidently intended as compliments to the sove- 
reign who had shewn special favour to the Globe Company. 
Among them are Macbeth's vision of kings, including some that 
"two-fold balls and treble sceptres carry," and the incident of 
touching for the king's evil, a power which James claimed as 
hereditary in the Stuart house. 

There is, further, as Dr Herford and others have shown, 
a definite reference to the trial of the Gunpowder Plot con- 
spirators in the Porter scene. 

"The Porter," says Dr Herford, "utters allusive jests on 
topics of 1606; the phenomenally abundant harvest and the 
Jesuit Garnet's defence of equivocation at his trial in the 
spring^." 

The usually accepted date is, then, some time in 1606, and 
other indications both of metre and style, agree very well 
with this estimate. 

The date of the play is thus sufficiently well known and 
the play itself has a certain obvious connection with James I. 

^ Shakespeare and his Predecessors. 
2 Macbeth: Eversley Edition. 



38 The Subject of Macbeth and 

Sir Sidney Lee puts it*: 

The story was drawn from Holinshed's Chronicle of Scottish 
History, with occasional reference, perhaps, to earUer Scottish 
sources. But the Chronicler's bald record supplied Shakespeare 
with the merest scaffolding. Duncan appears in the Chronicle 
as an incapable ruler, whose removal commends itself to his 
subjects, while Macbeth, in spite of the crime to which he owes 
his throne, proves a satisfactory sovereign through the greater 
part of his seventeen years reign. 

Only towards the close does his tyranny provoke the popular 
rebellion which proves fatal to him, 

Holinshed's notice of Duncan's murder by Macbeth is 
bare of detail. Shakespeare in his treatment of that episode 
adapted Holinshed's more precise account of another murder — 
that of King Duff, an earlier Scottish king, who was slain by 
the chief Donwald, while he was on a visit to the chief's castle. 
The vaguest hint was offered by the chronicler of Lady 
Macbeth's influence over her husband... every scene which has 
supreme dramatic value is the poet's own invention Shake- 
speare was under no debt to any predecessor for the dagger scene, 
for the thrilling colloquy of husband and wife concerning 
Duncan's murder, for Banquo's apparition at the feast, or for 
Lady Macbeth's walking in her sleep. 

The play gives a plainer inclination than any other of 
Shakespeare's works of the dramatist's desire to conciliate the 
Scottish king's idiosyncrasies. The supernatural machinery of 
the three witches which Holinshed suggested accorded with the 
king's known faith in demonology. The dramatist was lavish 
in sympathy with Banquo, James' reputed ancestor and founder 
of the Stuart dynasty; while Macbeth's vision of kings who 
"two-fold balls and treble sceptres carry" (iv. i. 121) loyally re- 
ferred to the union of Scotland with England and Ireland under 
James' sway. The two " balls " or globes were the royal insignia 
which King James bore in right of his double kingship of 
England and Scotland, and the three sceptres were those of his 
three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. 

No monarch before James I held these emblems con- 
jointly. 

1 Life of William Shakespeare. * 



the Union of the Crowns 39 

Now, before passing on, there are several things to notice 
here: 

(i) It is generally accepted (Mr Boas and Sir Sidney Lee 
are sufficient examples) that Macbeth has a direct con- 
nection with Jcimes I and introduces direct compliments 
to him. 

(2) That these compliments are closely connected with 
the Union of the Crowns and bear directly upon it. 

(3) That though the main outline of the story is taken 
from Holinshed that chronicler supplies the baldest scaf- 
folding. 

(4) That Shakespeare has inserted in the midst of the 
story an incident (the murder of Duff) taken from an entirely 
different reign. 

(5) That the character of Macbeth differs markedly from 
Holinshed's Macbeth and that the scenes which are most 
important in Shakespeare have not even a suggestion in 
Holinshed. 

These details are important because I hope to show: 

(a) The reason for every change Shakespeare makes in his 
source : the insertion of the murder of Duff by Donwald, the 
change of Macbeth's motive from revenge to ambition, the 
increased importance of the part played by Lady Macbeth, 
etc., etc. 

(b) The true sources of the material not suggested by 
Holinshed: the colloquy between husband and wife, the 
knocking at the door, the dagger-scene, the witch-scenes, 
the Banquo murder scene, etc., etc. 

Shakespeare, as I have shown before 1, had an important 
reason for choosing the subject of Macbeth as such. Ac- 
cording to the Merlin prophecies, as interpreted by the 
Tudor bards, the Arthurian Empire was to be restored and 
1 Hamlet and the Scottish Succession, Introduction. 



40 The Subject of Macbeth and 

the unity of Britain to be achieved when the true British 
Une succeeded to the Enghsh throne. Both the Tudors and 
the Stuarts claimed descent from the ancient British Hne. 
The Tudors, as their genealogy by Camden shows, claimed 
descent from Prince Llewelyn and, through him, from Brutus 
the Trojan. The Stuarts were similarly derived through 
Fleance the son of Banquo. 

Now, Macbeth knew, for the witches had told him, that 
the line of Banquo was destined to succeed to the crown ; 
hence his attempt to destroy Banquo and his offspring ; but 
Banquo escaped and fled to Wales to Griffith ap Llewelyn : 
"To him and Nesta, the Prince's daughter," says Selden, 
"was issue one Walter.... He was made Lord High Stewart 
of Scotland; out of whose loins Robert H was derived^." 

Macbeth was really the person who brought about 
the fulfilment of the Merlin prophecies, and, exactly as 
happened in the Greek tale of (Edipus, he caused the fulfil- 
ment of the prophecies by the very means he took to avoid 
them; it was just precisely his murder of Banquo and his 
attempted murder of FleancQ which caused the flight of 
Fleance to Wales and his union there with the princess of the 
ancient British line brought the blood of that British line 
into the veins of the Stuarts and so to the throne of Scotland. 

James I took a keen interest in prophecy, especially such 
as related to himself, and prided himself greatly on being 
the destined restorer of the ancient Arthurian Empire. It 
would thus have been hardly possible for Shakespeare to 
choose a subject more appropriate to be represented before 
him and which was calculated to please him better. More- 
over, a Jacobean audience would readily understand it 
because it was so frequent a theme ^. 

^ Notes to Drayton's Polyolbion. 

^ See also Drayton's Polyolbion, Songs V and X. , 



the Union of the Crowns 41 

Further, we observe the great stress laid on prophecy 
throughout the play; we see the enormous importance at- 
tached to the question of the succession in Macbeth's mind 
and finally we have the allusion to the unity of the British 
Isles, the kings who, "twofold balls and treble sceptres 
carry," and whose line stretches out to the "crack of doom." 

Macbeth's anxiety about the succession is somewhat 
curious as it appears in the play, for we are not shown his 
children and they do not appear upon the stage. 

Now let us put these facts together. Let us observe that 
the date of Macbeth appears to be soon or immediately after 
Gunpowder Plot, November, 1605, and that the most definite 
time-reference in the play (i.e. that to Father Garnet's 
trial) is concerned with that plot. Let us also recollect that 
the play appears to have a definite bearing on the unity of 
the British Isles and the restored Arthurian Empire. 

James himself believed, and a good many of his subjects 
believed, that the Gunpowder Plot was aimed against him 
especially because he had succeeded in uniting the British 
Isles. He had in this way made Britain the great protagonist 
of the Protestant faith and incurred the enmity of the 
Catholic powers. I will give several extracts which bear upon 
this subject. 

The first is a report of the Spanish Council of State to 
Philip III, February ist, 1603^. 

Shakespeare cannot have known the deliberations of the 
Spanish Council of State; but he knew, for all intelligent 
Englishmen did know, the situation at least as well as the 
Spaniards and he knew, for all intelligent Englishmen did 
know, exactly what their conclusions were likely to be. 

The extract deals with the question of the succession to 
the English throne : 

* Simancas Archives. 



42 The Subject of Macbeth and 

the introduction of the Infanta and the Archduke involved so 
many manifestly grave difficulties that it would be better to 
promote the cause of one of the native claimants, who was a 
Catholic and might be pitted against the King of Scotland 

The Marquis de Posa added that, if we could not manage 
to place a Catholic monarch on the Enghsh throne it would be 
better to have any heretic there rather than the King of 
Scotland who is so pertinacious and badly intentioned in his 
heresy, because of the power which the united kingdoms would 
possess if held by so evil a person... the worst solution for us 
may be regarded as the succession of the King of Scotland. 
He is not only personally to be mistrusted but the union of 
the two kingdoms and above all the increment of England in 
her present position, and with the naval forces she possesses, 
would be a standing danger to your Majesty in a vital point, 
namely, the navigation to both Indies. To this must be added 
the hatred which has always existed between the crowns of 
Spain and Scotland — 

The King of Scotland, moreover, has been badly reared 
among heretics, and has exhibited in all his actions a false and 
shifty inclination. 

Such a passage is enough to show how intensely the union 
of the Crowns was dreaded by Spain, and precisely for that 
reason, i.e. as a weapon against Spain, it was so intensely 
desired by a large number of Englishmen. 

James himself loved tradition and hoary antiquity, and 
he was particularly anxious to be known as the restorer of 
the Arthurian Empire. Thus in the Venetian State Papers, 
April 17th, 1603, we find a despatch regarding the new 
Monarch : 

He will stay a few days in Berwick in order to arrange the 
form of the union of these two crowns. It is said that he is 
disposed to abandon the titles of England and Scotland, and 
to call himself King of Great Britain, and like that famous 
and ancient King Arthur to embrace under one name the whole 
circuit of one thousand seven hundred miles which includes 
the United Kingdom now possessed by His Majesty in that 
island. 



the Union of the Crowns 43 

When James' poets wished to compHment him they could 

not compUment him more than on his occupation of Arthur's 

chair, as in Ben Jonson's Masque of Queens: "A night of 

homage to the British Court and ceremony due to Arthur's 

chair... the only great true majesty restored in this seat." 

This plan was not received with equanimity by James' 

subjects. Neither of his Parliaments approved of carrying 

the Union as far as the king desired, nor did they wish to 

merge the names of the separate peoples in that of Great 

Britain. A good deal of ill-feeling was caused and there was 

much discontent. On June 4th, 1603, Scaramelli writes: 

The ill-will between the English and Scottish goes on rising 
rapidly. It serves nothing that the king declares his resolve 
to extinguish both names, and that both people shall pass under 
the common name of Britons^. 

It was quite commonly believed, not only that the Gun- 
powder Plot was due to a Catholic conspiracy, but also that 
it was supported by a number of discontented subjects who 
disliked the Union and were willing to destroy the king as 
the chief author and agent of its accomplishment. 

Thus in the Domestic Papers'^ for November 6th^, we find 
an account of how James proposed an interrogatory of one 
of the accused: "Suggests whether he be not the author of 
a 'cruel pasquil' against himself for assuming the 'name 
of Britain' (i.e. King of Great Britain) in which his de- 
struction was prophesied." 

Selden also recounts that the Gunpowder Plot was quite 

generally supposed to be aimed against the Union. Thus in 

the Metamorphosis Anglorum he states: 

Elisabetha, Angliae Regina, innupta moritur, Successorem 
dixit, habuitque Jacobam VI ejus nominis Scotorum Regem, 

^ Venetian State Papers. 

2 English State Papers'. Domestic Series. 

3 1605. 



44 The Subject of Macbeth and 

Magnae autem Britanniae I. consanguinem proximum. Sic 
Scotia et Anglia sub uno eodemque Principe conjunctae sunt, 
Regnaque Magnae Britanniae novo nomine appellatur. Majori- 
bus hostium insidiis expositum et pene oppressum Magnae 
Britanniae Regnum fuit, pulvere pyrio in effossam sub Parla- 
menti aula humum illato, quo Rex, et soboles Regia, et 
procerum optimi quique ac maxime, e medio tollerentur: sed 
eae insidiae mox per conscios detectae sunt. 

As we have seen, James had further the idea that the 
powers of evil were leagued against him to prevent in the 
first place his accession to the English Crown and, in the 
second place, to destroy him when he succeeded. He was 
the champion of Protestantism, he was also the man destined 
to unite the British Isles and he quite genuinely believed 
in a league against him directly fomented by Satan himself. 

Nor must James be accused, in holding this belief, of any 
special degree of superstition, or of any special degree of 
self-conceit or self-importance, for it was an opinion fully 
shared by the principal judges of the Scottish bench and 
by the members of James' Privy Council. 

I shall return to this question in a subsequent chapter, 
but a reference to Pitcairn's Ancient Scottish Criminal Trials 
as well as numerous proclamations and State Papers make 
it abundantly evident that, in the reign of James, there 
were repeated trials for witchcraft and sorcery. These evil 
practices were supposed to be largely in the hands of 
Catholics and to be aimed against James in his capacity as 
Protestant heir to England. There was a regular witch's 
synod held at Caithness, visited by Satan himself, who in- 
structed his deluded followers how to destroy the king. 
Moreover, the men who were James' chief enemies and 
whom he certainly believed to be plotting against his life, 
i.e. Francis, Earl Bothwell and the Earl of Gowry, were both 
accused of sharing in these practices. 



the Union of the Crowns 45 

James regarded himself and his Hne as capital objects of 
dispute between the forces of evil and of good. On the one 
hand sorcerers, witches and traitors (directly instructed by 
Satan) were in league to destroy him and his heirs; on the 
other hand his victory and the victory of his line, and the 
Union of the British Isles by their means, had been pro- 
phesied for centuries before his birth and divine powers 
were pledged to ensure it. 

As I have said the opinion was quite commonly shared 
by his Scottish subjects, even those in the most eminent 
positions. 

Let us only consider the congratulatory letter which the 
Privy Council of Scotland sent to James on his escape from 
Gunpowder Plot and which was dated from Edinburgh, 
November, 1605. One passage runs: 

Since the glad tidings came to us of your Majesty's happy 
delivery from the abominable conspiracy so inhumanly con- 
trived by the devil and his supporters against your royal 
person, the Queen and your Majesty's children. 

On November 26th, 1605, there was a Proclamation to 
the Fencibles of Scotland to be in readiness to defend the 
king which contains the following reference : 

this detestable plot which without the concourse of all the 
devils and malignant spirits within the precinct of this universe, 
their supporters and deputies upon the face of the earth, could 
never have been excogitated. 

On the subject of the Union, both Masson and Gardiner 
are interesting and, for our purpose, pertinent. Masson 
says^ : 

Nothing is more creditable to King James than the strength 
of his passion for such a union of the two kingdoms and peoples 
as might fitly follow the union of the two crowns. The intensity 

1 Preface to the Register of the Privy Council of Scotland. 



46 The Subject of Macbeth and 

of his conception of the desirable union is not more remarkable 
than its thorough-going generality. For centuries the main 
island of Britain had been divided politically into an England 
and a Scotland. There had been fierce war between the two 
nations and there was still an inheritance of international ani- 
mosity but, now that the crowns of both nations had been 
happily united in his own sacred person... was not that a signal 
that the division and the animosity were henceforward to cease ? 

What had hitherto been the "Borders" or "Marches" be- 
tween the two kingdoms were they not now simply the " Middle 
Shires" of one and the same dominion and ought they not to 
be re-christened by that name ? 

Nay, why should the distinctive names of England and 
Scotland be perpetuated more than reference to the past might 
make inevitable? 

Why should they not be known henceforth as North Britain 
and South Britain, integral parts of the same Great Britain ? . . . 

His right to abolish the name of the "Borders" and sub- 
stitute that of the "Middle Shires" had been assumed almost 
since the day of his departure from Scotland. That was a 
trifle, however, in comparison with his attempt by his own 
royal authority to abolish the names England and Scotland in 
all general documents, and to enforce the adoption of the name 
of Great Britain. 

The proclamation alluded to by Masson is that of 
November ist, 1604: 

Proclamation anent his Majesty's new style and title of King 
of Great Britain. 

James R. Whereas it hath pleased gracious Providence of 
the Most High in this thrice happy fulness of time, to join and 
unite in our royal person the two most ancient and famous 
kingdoms of Scotland and England in unity of allegiance, we 
think it every way repugnant... 

that it which by God and nature's frame was made one (and 
now to the great joy of so many hearts, united in our person 
in one invincible monarchy, is one) should any longer retain 
the memory of the distracted dominions... and seeing nothing 
is able to procure our better service at home and greater terror 
to any enemies abroad... we have resolved... that as our im- 



the Union of the Crowns 47 

perial monarchy of these two great kingdoms doth comprehend, 
the whole Island... so it shall keep in all ensuing the united 
denomination of the invincible monarchy of Great Britain... 
therefore we assume unto ourselves the style and title of King 
of Great Britain, France and Ireland as our just and lawful 
style... 

discharging and discontinuing the several names of Scotland 
and England. 

Gardiner^ quotes a passage in the indictment of Guy 
Fawkes to the effect that 

the conspirators should have surprised the person of our Lady 
Elizabeth and presently have proclaimed her queen, to which 
purpose a proclamation was drawn, as well as to avow and 
justify the action, as to have protested against the Union and 
in no sort to have meddled with religion therein and to have 
protested against all strangers, that is to say against all Scots. 
We can readily understand that Privy Councillors, knowing as 
they did the Hne taken by the King in the matter of the union 
would be unwilling to spread information of there being in 
England a Protestant party opposed to the union, not only of 
sufficient importance to be worth gaining, but so exasperated 
that even these gunpowder plotters could think it possible to 
win them to their side. 

Another important point to notice in this connection is 
that James laid the very greatest stress on the theory of 
the Divine Right of Kings, in which he earnestly believed, 
and the best minds of the time were inclined to agree with 
him because, as both Gardiner and Figgis point out, the 
claim of the Divine Right of Kings was a very important 
weapon in the struggle for national rights against the 
Papacy. 

"Before the Reformation," says Gardiner, "the clergy owed 
a great part of their power to the organisation which centred 
in Rome, and the only way to weaken that organisation was 
to strengthen the national organisation which centred in the 

i What Gunpowder Plot was. 



48 The Subject of Macbeth and 

crown. Hence these notions of the Divine Right of Kings and 
of cujus regio ejus rehgio which, however theoretically inde- 
fensible, marked a stage of progress in the world's career... if 
the religious teaching of the Reformed Church fell, a whole 
system of earthly government would fall with it." 

Mr Figgis^ has several passages to the same effect. Thus 
he says : 

England was free from papal interference if only she could 
maintain her position. The battle was not won yet and in this 
fact lies the justification of mens passionate faith in the Divine 
Right of Kings. We are too apt to think that from the time of 
Henry VI 11 or at least of Elizabeth, the success of the English 
Reformation was assured. The persistent efforts of foreign 
powers to convert England, the dreams of so able a man as 
Gondomar...are alone sufficient proof to the contrary. If all 
danger of England's submitting to the Papal yoke were over, 
certainly the fact was unknown at the time either to English 
statesmen or to Papal diplomatists. England in the time of 
Henry VIII asserted her claims to independence. A century 
of statesmanship and conflict were required before they were 
finally made good. Thus a theory was needful which should 

express the national aspirations The EngUsh state must assert 

a claim to Divine appointment. 

Figgis says again: 

There were many reasons why James I should hold the 
doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings in its strictest form. His 
claim to the throne of England rested upon descent alone; 
barred by two acts of Parliament, it could only be successfully 
maintained by means of the legitimist principle. Further, it 
was disputed by the Roman controversialists, who had not 
sufficient hope of converting James to make them love his 
title. Doleman's attack upon the hereditary principle is written 
from the Papalist standpoint. 

And again, 

In his (i.e. James') True Doctrine of Free Monarchies which 
saw the light five years before the death of Elizabeth is to be 

1 Divine Right of Kings. 



the Union of the Crowns 49 

found the doctrine of Divine Right complete in every detail. On 
his accession Parliament passed a statute which purported not 
to give James a title but merely to declare his inherent right. 

In this connection we may refer to the scene in Macbeth 
which introduces the gift of Edward the Confessor in 
touching for the "king's evil." 

The majority of commentators are agreed that this 
passage, which has no particular relevance where it appears 
in the play, has been introduced as a compliment to James ; 
but it seems to me to have a really important political 
bearing, far more than that of a mere personal compliment. 

Throughout Macbeth Shakespeare's eyes are fixed on the 
Union of the Crowns; James himself claimed the "peculiar 
grace" of curing the "king's evil" by touch, and his power 
in this respect would be taken as a proof of his lineal descent 
from the kings of England, of the Divine Right of those 
kings themselves and, further, of James' own Divine Right 
to the realm. 

Obviously the theory of a Divine Right inherent in James 
would be very much strengthened if it could be proved that 
secular prophecy had also foretold his advent to the throne. 
I have already quoted one passage with regard to the Merlin 
prophecies, but there were many other such prophecies 
which James appears to have approved. 

Thus in the year 1603 there was published a book entitled 
Scottish Prophecies, printed by Robert Waldegrave, printer 
to the King's most excellent Majesty. 

It is described as "the whole prophecy of Scotland, 
England and some part of France and Denmark, prophesied 
by marvellous Merlin, Bede, Thomas the Rymer...all ac- 
cording in one." 

The most germane for our purpose is the prophecy given 
under the name of "Sibylla Regina": 

W. M. 4 



50 The Subject of Macbeth and 

...she maketh mention of two noble princes and emperors the 
which is called Leones, these two shall subdue and overcome all 
earthly princes to their diadem and crown, and also be glorified 
and crowned in the heaven among saints. The first of these 
two is Magnus Constantinus. The second is the ninth king of 
the name of Steward of Scotland, the which is our most noble 
king. 

There is also a confirmatory prophecy by Thomas the 
Rymer : 

Where dwells thou or in what country, or who shall rule the 
Isle of Britain From the North to the South Sea? a French 
wife shall bear the son. Shall rule all Britain to the sea, that 
of the Bruce's blood shall come, as near to the ninth degree. 

We are now in a position to see what the subject of 
Macbeth really meant and with what intensity it must have 
appealed to the immediate interests and emotions of Shake- 
speare's audience, and do not let us forget that the king 
himself is probably appealed to most immediately and 
directly. 

The king is a Scottish monarch and the scene of the play 
is laid in Scotland. The king prides himself on being the 
person destined to restore the ancient Arthurian Empire 
and to unite Britain from the north to the south sea; he 
believes that his advent has been prophesied from earliest 
times by Merlin, by Sibylla, by Thomas the Rymer; he 
believes that God has marked him personally by investing 
him with the grace of curing the "king's evil" by his touch; 
he believes that he is destined to preside over a great in- 
vincible Protestant power and that, because of this destiny, 
the forces of evil by means of witches and evil spirits have 
leagued themselves against him. A terrible plot has recently 
been discovered aimed partly at the true religion, but mainly 
at the unity of Britain, and which was intended to destroy 
the prophesied king and extirpate his prophesied line. Nor 



the Union of the Crowns 51 

are these beliefs peculiar to the king. They are passionately 
accepted by his subjects. His subjects are, most of them, 
intensely eager for the Union of the Crowns for they want 
to strengthen England by this Union in her hereditary 
struggle against Spain. His subjects are passionately eager 
to believe in his Divine Right because to claim it for their 
king is the simplest way of asserting their own right to 
national development as against the claims of the papacy; 
therefore his subjects eagerly accept the idea that his advent 
has been prophesied from the earliest times and that God 
has given him the divine grace of curing the "king's evil." 
His subjects also believe that he has all his life been perse- 
cuted by the powers of evil who are leagued against him 
to prevent the growth of the great Protestant Empire ; the 
Privy Council of Scotland are so sure of it that they refer 
to it as a matter of course in their proclamations and their 
letters. 

And now let us just reflect how ideally suited the subject 
of Macbeth is to appeal to all this complex of emotions. 

Its central figure is the man who tried to avert the Merlin 
prophecies by destroying Banquo and his line and so pre- 
venting the restoration of the Arthurian Empire, and who, 
like the parents of (Edipus, only succeeded in fulfilling the 
prophecy. Throughout the play prophecy is dwelt on as a 
main motive, and we see the culmination of this prophecy in 
the succession of the British kings and the permanence of the 
British Empire, for the kings carry" twofold balls and treble 
sceptres " and their lines stretch out to the " crack of doom." 
The witches and evil spirits of the play attempt to destroy 
Banquo and the line of Banquo — the Stuart kings — just as, 
in James' own life, they had attempted to destroy him and 
his heirs. They are foiled as they had been foiled in the 
life-time of James, and these very powers of evil themselves 



52 Subject of Macbeth and Union of the^Crowns 

are forced, by a supreme compliment, to give testimony to 
the permanence of his empire and his hne. 

Nor must we, in any sense, look upon the play merely as 
a piece of royal compliment or literary artifice. The subject 
chosen by Shakespeare profoundly interested the whole 
nation. The idea of the unity of the British Isles was one 
that appealed to the best minds of the time; it interested 
Bacon for instance, no less than James I. Nationalism was 
the advanced principle of the age, as contrasted with the 
reactionary doctrine of Papalism, to fight passionately for 
the nationalist principle meant to fight for freedom of thought 
against papal supremacy, it meant the possibility of political 
freedom and political development. British unity meant the 
achievement of a great Protestant Empire which would 
ensure freedom of thought and liberty and on which, there- 
fore, there turned the whole freedom of the world. 

The true subject of Macbeth seems to me to be the furious 
attempt of the powers of evil to prevent the foundation 
(or as that age would have put it, the restoration) of the 
British Empire, to destroy liberty of thought and the 
freedom of the world. 

I think it a great subject and I think we very much under- 
estimate the genius of Shakespeare when we fail to com- 
prehend how vast his subjects really are. 



CHAPTER II 

THE GUNPOWDER PLOT, THE DARNLEY MURDER 
AND THE MASSACRE OF ST BARTHOLOMEW 

We, in these modern days, hardly regard the Gunpowder 
Plot seriously; it was an abortive conspiracy and it was so 
fantastic in all its details that we can hardly believe there 
was ever serious danger to be apprehended. But Shake- 
speare and the men of his time cannot be understood unless 
we remember that they saw historical events in a quite 
different perspective from our own and felt them with a 
quite different intensity. 

They certainly took the Gunpowder Plot as seriously as 
it was possible to take anything. James was, quite in- 
evitably, reminded of the murder of his father; he regarded 
the Plot as an attempt to make him share a similar fate; it 
recalled to his mind the ghastly details of his father's murder 
and filled him with apprehensions of a similar fate. 

The English nation, as a whole, were full of horror and 
consternation; they regarded the Plot as a Catholic con- 
spiracy to destroy the leaders of a Protestant nation and 
they compared it, very naturally, to St Bartholomew. It 
was a St Bartholomew which had been foiled, yet it might 
be the precursor of a new and successful scheme. The like- 
ness to St Bartholomew was increased by the fact that the 
French ambassador was implicated or was supposed to be 
implicated; there was no certain evidence of his guilt, but 
he fled and his flight was justly regarded as an extremely 
suspicious circumstance. Moreover, he does not seem to have 
been trusted even in his own country, for Henry IV regarded 
his conduct as suspicious and declined to receive him. 



54 The Gunpowder Plot, the Damley Murder 

In this connection we may quote the Venetian State 
Papers', as they were uncensored despatches, they are in 
some ways a more valuable and veracious picture of the 
mind of the time than even the English State Papers them- 
selves, and they reflect most admirably the emotions of the 
moment. Shakespeare, we must remember, lived through 
the moment itself and shared the emotions. 

Thus Nicolo Molin writes to Venice: 

About two months ago Lord Salisbury received anonymous 
letters from France, warning him to be on his guard, for a 
great conspiracy was being hatched by priests and Jesuits; 
but as similar information had been sent a year ago by the 
English lieger in France, no great attention was paid to these 
letters and they were attributed to the empty-headed vanity 
of persons who wished to seem more conversant with affairs 
than became them. 

Molin tells the story of the famous letter and says : 

Lord Mounteagle read the letter and, in great astonishment 
took it to the Earl of Salisbury, who at once carried it to the 
King. 

...Meantime, the King read the letter and in terrified amaze 
he said " I remember that my father died by gunpowder. I see 
the letter says the blow is to be struck on a sudden. Search 
the basements of the meeting place." 

Thus we see that from the very beginning (Molin writes 
on November i6th, 1605) it was the common belief that the 
king had himself detected the plot because of its remarkable 
similarity in certain details to the plot which culminated 
in his father's murder. 

Molin writes on the subsequent day (November 17th) : 

It was a Catholic plot and the king said had it been suc- 
cessful it would have been the most stupendous and amazing 
event ever heard of.... Had it succeeded upwards of thirty 
thousand persons and those the most prominent would have 
been slain.... 



and the Massacre of St Bartholomew 55 

There is also a grave suspicion that the Pope may be the 
source of the Plot, for, as it is a question of religion, it seems 
impossible he should not have assented even if he took no active 
part in it. 

...Finally they have a deep suspicion of France whose Am- 
bassador left eight days ago without awaiting his successor. 
When they learned that on account of the weather, he had 
not been able to cross the Channel the same night the plot was 
discovered, they sent orders to Dover that he was not to cross 
until further instructions. 

Molin writes again on November 21st: 

The King is in terror; he does not appear nor does he take 
his meals in pubhc as usual. He lives in the innermost rooms 
with only Scotchmen about him.... Catholics fear heretics and 
vice versa... both are armed; foreigners live in terror of their 
houses being sacked by the mob which is convinced that some, 
if not all foreign princes, are at the bottom of the plot. The 
King and Council have very prudently thought it advisable to 
quiet the popular feeling by issuing a proclamation in which 
they declare that no foreign Sovereign had any part in the 

conspiracy The conduct of the French Ambassador is much 

criticised, not only on the ground of what I have already re- 
ported but because he would not wait for the letters the Queen 
was writing for France. He insisted on crossing on Monday 
evening though the weather was bad.... He embarked three 
hours before the King's orders to put off his departure reached 
Dover and his passage was both troublesome and dangerous. 
They argue from this that the Ambassador, if he had not a 
share in the plot, at least had some knowledge of it and there 
is no doubt that these suspicions... may still produce a very 
bad effect. 

Molin gives, as will be seen, a most vivid picture of the 
terrified James, hiding at the back of his palace for fear 
of experiencing a fate like his father's, and of the fear and 
suspicion of the mob and their intense anger against the 
French Catholics who were for ever accursed in English 
eyes on account of St Bartholomew. 



56 The Gunpowder Plot^ the Darnley Murder 

Molin writes again (December 8th) : 

It is quite clear that none but Cathohcs had a hand in the 
plot.... On all hands one hears nothing in the mouth of the 
people and of the preachers except curses and insults against 
the Catholic religion, which, so they say, permits and approves 
such iniquities and inhuman actions as to blow into the air 
thirty thousand persons at a single stroke. 

On December 22nd, Molin states that a list of all the 
Scots in London had been found and the general idea was 
that a massacre of Scots had been intended. 

Many Scots are thinking of returning home for they fear that 
some day a general massacre may take place.... His Majesty 
is credited with a design to send the Prince to reside in Scotland ; 
in this way he hopes to secure his family, for it is clear that 
there are many who hate not only his person but his whole race. 

We can see, on the face of it, after having read such a 
despatch how easily the audience would perceive in Macbeth's 
attempt to extirpate the race of Banquo, son and father 
together, a parallel to the tragedy attempted in the Gun- 
powder Plot. 

Molin also states (December 22nd) that suspicion against 
the French ambassador increased daily; on Tuesday, the day 
the mine was to have been fired, he sent a Courier with a 
letter in which he said: "To-day a crushing blow against 
the King, his house and all the nobility of England is to be 
delivered." 

Now, in Hamlet and the Scottish Succession, I endeavoured 
to show that the main part of the material employed in 
Hamlet was really historical and that it was the historical 
material of most immediate interest to Shakespeare's audience. 
At the time Hamlet was written the subjects of most im- 
mediate interest to the Elizabethan public were the Essex 
conspiracy and the question of the Scottish succession. I 
endeavoured to show that, as Essex was supposed to have 



and the Massacre of St Bartholomew 57 

died in his effort to bring about the Scottish succession and 
to have perished as a martyr in the cause of James, the 
two subjects were inseparably united in the minds of the 
audience and would thus be easily made a literary unity 
by the poet. 

I showed that the true material of Hamlet was drawn not 
from the so-called literary source in the Amleth Saga which 
was really a quite different tale; but that the true material 
was drawn from the history of James I and the history of 
Essex. These two subjects are not a unity for us but they 
were a unity for Shakespeare's audience because the tragedy 
of the Essex conspiracy had bound them inseparably to- 
gether and thus, throughout the play of Hamlet, Shakespeare 
was appealing to a pre-existent unity in the minds of his 
audience. 

Now, something of the same kind appears to me to have 
happened in the case of Macbeth and King Lear. In each 
case the poet is working to a pre-existent unity in the minds 
of his audience. What was the subject that filled the popular 
mind and the king's mind, for Shakespeare, be it remem- 
bered, was writing especially for the Court at the time 
Macbeth and King Lear were written? 

Undoubtedly, as our contemporary documents have al- 
ready been sufficient to show, undoubtedly that subject was 
the Gunpowder Plot as it involved the fate of James I, of 
his line, of the whole future of England. 

Moreover, the plot reminded everybody, the king himself 
and his people, of two of the most terrible tragedies of 
history, one the Darnley murder which even modern his- 
torians have described as the most pathetic tale in the 
annals of Scotland, and the other what is certainly one of 
the most appalling tragedies in all the dramatic and won- 
derful history of France — the massacre of St Bartholomew. 



58 The Gunpowder Plot, the Darnley Murder 

I believe that Shakespeare has done in Macbeth almost 
precisely what he did in Hamlet \ he has treated of the 
subjects of most immediate interest to his audience and he 
has worked to a unity pre-existent in the minds of his 
audience: a unity which includes the personal history of 
James I, especially as persecuted by the spirits of evil, who 
had just made in Gunpowder Plot their last and most 
terrible attempt to extirpate the king and his line, and 
which includes also the parallel cases of the Darnley murder 
and the massacre of St Bartholomew. All this cannot possibly 
be treated effectively in one drama, but some portions had 
been treated of in Hamlet (i.e. part of the Darnley tale) and 
other portions were to be treated of in King Lear. 

In the case of Hamlet I showed, or endeavoured to show, 
that the so-called literary source was partly a framework 
and partly a disguise. Now in Macbeth the literary source 
is much more important than it was in Hamlet, probably 
for the reason that the literary source itself, i.e. the story 
of Macbeth, had (as I endeavoured to show in Chapter i) 
an important and powerful bearing on the immediate situa- 
tion. The story of Macbeth, as such, really does bear on the 
true subject in the poet's mind, and I find therefore that the 
literary source of Macbeth (i.e. Holinshed) is far more im- 
portant than the literary source of Hamlet or the literary 
source of King Lear. 

Now it is, of course, a commonplace that the actual story 
of Macbeth is taken from Holinshed, and from his account 
of the reign of Macbeth; but, as the quotation from Sir 
Sidney Lee^ has already shown, the poet has introduced into 
the midst of the tale a narrative drawn from a quite different 
reign: the murder of Duff by Donwald. 

Now why? Shakespeare, in this case also, is surely doing 

^ In Chap. I. 



and the Massacre of St Bartholomew 59 

something very curious for he is altering a story which was 
quite generally accepted as veracious history, and inserting 
into the midst of it a story from another period. We must 
remember that Holinshed's Chronicle was genuinely re- 
garded by the Elizabethans as true and veracious history. 

Try and imagine a similar parallel in a modern writer! 
Imagine that Browning in the midst of his Strafford had 
introduced an account of the voyage of Francis Drake, or 
of the battle of Blenheim. Should we not be startled by 
such an anachronism and enquire into its meaning? 

The true explanation seems once again to lie in the 
mentality of the audience, and in the nature of their pre- 
occupations at the date when Macbeth was written. 

As the extracts quoted above have shown, the Gunpowder 
Plot was repeatedly compared to the Darnley murder. Now 
the murder of Duff by Donwald had several times been 
quoted by contemporary writers^ as the nearest parallel to 
the Darnley murder to be found in the annals of Scotland. 

In this lies, surely, a very plausible motive for its in- 
clusion in the tale of Macbeth} Shakespeare's king and 
patron is cowering at the bottom of his palace in terror lest 
he should experience a fate like the fate of his father. 
Shakespeare has chosen a subject for a tragic drama which 
already has the closest relation to the subjects of his king's 
accession, his mission, his dynasty and the supernatural 
beings whom he has always regarded as his most formidable 
enemies. Shakespeare now modifies this subject by inserting 
into it another and a different story which is already ad- 
mitted as the closest parallel in the annals of Scotland to 
the murder of the king's father. 

Moreover, as I shall show later, he modifies this tale (i.e. 
the murder of Duff) in order to make it resemble far more 
^ Belief orest and Adam Blackwood. 



6o The Gunpowder Plot, the Darnley Murder 

closely than in the original the Darnley murder. Is not the 
motive obvious? Who could miss seeing a parallel which is, 
in itself, so very close and which had already been suggested 
more than once to the popular mind? 

The Maitland Club has published a contemporary trans- 
lation (1587) made by Adam Blacvod or Blackwood of a 
work entitled Martyre de Marie Stuart Royne d'Escosse et 
Douariere de France'^. 

In this book Murray and Morton are made the villains of 
the story and the murder itself is compared to the murder 
of King Duff. 

They (i.e. Murray and Morton) have well learned the deceit 
of Donwald, sometime Captain of the castle of Forres in Scot- 
land, who murdered his liege lord Duffus, and punished cruelly 
many innocents, cruelly murdering them for the foul fact which 
he himself had done. But the Lord God in his mercy, who 
never leaveth such cruel facts unpunished... by a notable 
miracle made the authors of the cruel murder manifest. 

We may also quote from Belleforest's Histoire de Marie 
Royne d'Escosse, 1572. 

It is interesting to remember that another of Belleforest's 
books — Histoires Tragiqaes — either in the original or in the 
English translation is often supposed to have been the im- 
mediate source of the tale of Hamlet. 

The passage from Belief orest which I judge the most 
apposite is the following: 

Lisez les histoires d'Escosse, et y trouverez que Duffe roy 
d'Escosse fut traitreusement occis par un seigneur nomme 
Donwald, leqnel estoit le plus ayme et caresse de son prince.... 
Donwald, couvant une traitresse vengeance en son ame, dis- 
simulait accortement son maltalent et rancueur contre le roy, 
espiant neantmoins le temps, et I'occasion pour se prevaloir 
d'icelle, et venger sur le Roy.... En somme ce bon roy estant 
loge au chasteau de Foresse (duquel ce Donwald estoit gou- 

* Not so stated, but probably by Belleforest. See further. 



and the Massacre of St Bartholomew 6i 

verneur et capitaine) le traistre voyant le temps a propos pour 
executer son dessein, des que le roy fut couche, il se met a 
banqueter les Valetz de chambre et gardes de sa majeste et 
les festoya si bien jusqu'a mynuict que chargez de vins...ils 
s'endormirent. 

Belleforest goes on to explain how Donwald with four or 
five of his faithful servitors enters the chamber, murders the 
king while his guards still sleep, carries the body away and 
buries it in the bed of a neighbouring river whose waters 
are deflected for that purpose and then allowed to return ; 
the next morning the king's bed is found empty and 
covered with blood, and Donwald seizes and executes 
the unhappy "Valetz de chambre." Belleforest goes on to 
point what he thinks the close parallel with the Darnley 
murder : 

le conte de Murray a pratique la mort du seigneur d'Arlay 
depuis faignant une pareille saintete de justice, qu'a fait le 
bastard, il feit punir les innocens. 

Now here we have what is admittedly the central incident 
of the drama of Macbeth, i.e. the murder of Duff by Donwald 
— treated as the closest possible historical parallel to the 
Darnley murder and inserted in the very midst of a history 
of Mary, Queen of Scots. 

I do not for a moment believe that Shakespeare thought 
Murray and Morton the murderers, that was essentially 
the Catholic version and Shakespeare seems to me to take 
the Protestant version; none the less the parallel with the 
Donwald story had twice been pointed out and developed 
in detail by contemporary historians. 

Shakespeare, in his drama, has obviously modified the 
details of the Donwald story ; for instance the body of Duff 
is concealed in the bed of a river and afterwards found by 
miraculous means; this is told both by Holinshed and by 



62 The Gunpowder Plot, the Darnley Murder 

Belief orest. Now Shakespeare has not employed either of 
these incidents but, instead, he has modified the account of 
the murder to agree very closely with Buchanan's account 
of the Darnley murder. 

Anyone who will compare Shakespeare's account of the 
murder of Duncan with Holinshed's account of the murder 
of Duff will see that many of the most striking incidents are 
not in Holinshed and have no parallel in Holinshed. The 
detail that the grooms are drugged so that the murder can 
.take place without their interference and then afterwards 
accused of the murder belongs to the story of Duff. The 
story of Duff has, however, no parallel to the confer- 
ence between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth alone in their 
chamber, it has no parallel to the striking on the bell or to 
the preparing of the drink; it has no parallel to the strange 
and dreadful silence of the night, to Macbeth's disrobing 
and putting on his nightgown, or of his pretence to have 
been awakened from sleep, it has no parallel to the knocking 
on the gate; but all these incidents, as I shall show, have 
their parallels in the Darnley murder. 

But this is not all ! We have seen that the Gunpowder ^ 
Plot was also associated in the popular mind with the 
massacre of St Bartholomew, and the central incident in that 
massacre was the murder of Coligny. 

Now these two crimes (i.e. the murder of Darnley and the 
murder of Coligny) had already been linked together in the 
closest possible relation by the Huguenot historians^ of 
France who regarded them both as crimes of the Catholic 
League, crimes of the houses of Lorraine and Medici. It was 
this same Catholic League and the French branch of it in 
particular which were popularly considered responsible for 
Gunpowder Plot. 

^ Memoires de I'estat de France sous Charles IX. 



and the Massacre of St Bartholomew 63 

It seems to me that Shakespeare has also drawn on the 
St Bartholomew massacre and the murder of Coligny for 
a portion of his material, especially in his account of the 
murder of Banquo which is quite unlike anything he found 
in his source. 

I cannot see anything improbable in such an idea and 
for the following reasons: 

(i) Both these crimes were magnificent and terrible dra- 
matic material and, as a matter of fact, a number of drama- 
tists both in Shakespeare's day and since his time have used 
the story of Mary Stuart and the story of St Bartholomew 
for dramatic purposes. 

(2) The popular mind, violently excited and filled with 
terror by the Gunpowder Plot, was expecting every day 
actual living parallels to the Darnley murder and the St 
Bartholomew massacre. 

(3) The Huguenot historians had already associated these 
crimes and ascribed them both to the Catholic League. 
The English had a particular dread of the Catholic League 
and of Spain for they knew that their country was the object 
of its special animosity. 

(4) This dread of the Catholic League was well founded 
for it had succeeded in murdering many of the most pro- 
minent Protestants of Europe, and Henry IV of France was 
soon — 16 10 — to fall a victim to Catholic fanaticism. 

Shakespeare is doing in Macbethwh^Lt he did in Hamlet; he 
is dealing with the events of most immediate interest to his 
audience and he is working to a pre-existent unity in the 
minds of that audience. Events which may not seem con- 
nected to us were connected to him and to his audience 
because they were aU vividly alive in their minds at the same 
moment. In Hamlet he worked to an emotional complex in the 
minds of his audience ; in Macbeth he is working to a complex 



64 The Gunpowder Plot, the Darnley Murder 

equally intense and equally living, but not the same complex ; 
the Essex Conspiracy has faded into the background; it is 
now the older crimes of the Darnley murder and of the 
St Bartholomew massacre of which the audience has been 
made vividly aware ; but the interests of James himself are 
predominant in both dramas. 



CHAPTER III 

MACBETH AND THE DARNLEY MURDER 

As has been just pointed out, contemporary historians — 
Belleforest and Adam Blackwood — compared the Darnley 
murder to the murder of Duff by Donwald — the central 
incident of Macbeth. 

I propose to point out now how close the parallels between 
Macbeth and the Darnley murder really are. 

Thus the ambition of Bothwell is repeatedly dwelt on as 
a strongly pre-disposing motive. Robertson^ sums it up: 

Even in that turbulent age when so many vast projects were 
laid open to an aspiring mind, and invited to action, no man's 
ambition was more daring than Bothwell's or had recourse to 
bolder and more singular expedients for retaining power.... By 
complaisance and assiduity he confirmed and fortified these 
dispositions of the queen in his favour and insensibly paved 
the way towards that vast project which his ambition had 
perhaps already conceived, and which, in spite of so many 
difficulties and at the cost of so many crimes, he at last ac- 
complished. 

Now, in the murder of Duff by Donwald, the motive was 
not ambition but revenge; it was the revenge of a blood- 
feud; some of Donwald's relatives had been rebels; King 
Duff put them to death, and it was in order to avenge their 
deaths that Duff was murdered by Donwald. 

Shakespeare, in his Macbeth, has completely altered this 
motive and he has substituted Bothwell's motive of 

1 History of Scotland. 
w. M. 5 



66 Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

ambition. Stress is laid on ambition as Macbeth's predomi- 
nant motive throughout the play: 

thou wouldst be great, 
Art not without ambition; but without 
The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly, 
That wouldst thou holily^. 

In the original tale Duff was pursuing a blood-feud which 
gave him a kind of sanction; in Macbeth all the force is 
transferred to the more selfish motive of ambition and no 
mention is made of any personal injury. 

Everyone has observed the irony of the passage which 
makes Duncan praise the delicacy of the air on his entrance 
into Macbeth's castle^; but a precisely similar irony plays 
a large part in Buchanan's account of the Darnley murder 
and occurs also in Melville's Memoirs. 

Melville says: 

The King was afterwards brought and lodged in Kirk of 
Field as a place of good air where he might best recover his 
health; but many a one suspected that the Earl Bothwell had 
some enterprise against him. Few durst advertise him because 
he told all again to some of his own servants who were not 
honest. 

Buchanan^ says : 

Bothwell provided all things ready that were needful to 
accomplish the heinous act, first of all a house not commodious 
for a rich man, nor comely for a king, for it was both torn and 
ruinous, and had stood empty without any dweller for diverse 
years before. 

Again the Oration^ has : 

O good God ! Going about to murder her husband, seeketh 
she for a wholesome air?... 

But let us see what manner of wholesomeness of air it is? 

^ I. V. 2 J vi 

8 Detection of the Doings of Mary Queen of Scots. 
* Appended to Detection. 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 67 

The irony, it will be observed, is precisely similar to 
Shakespeare's in Macbeth. 

We might remember also that the House of Lorraine (to 
which Mary Queen of Scots on her mother's side belonged)^ 
had a "martlet" as its badge. It is possible that Shake- 
speare means this bird as a piece of symbolism which in- 
tensifies and deepens the irony. 

Dun. This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air 
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself 
Unto our gentle senses. 

Ban. This guest of summer, 

The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, 
By his lov'd mansionry, that the heaven's breath 
Smells wooingly here ; . . . 

Where they most breed and haunt, I have observ'd. 
The air is delicate 2. 

There is, of course, no mention of "wholesome air" in 
Holinshed's story; it is one of those profound tragic ironies 
which Shakespeare introduces himself and it is exactly like 
the tragic irony of the "wholesome air" in Buchanan's 
account of the Darnley murder. As Melville's mention of it 
in his Memoirs also serves to show, it had deeply im- 
pressed the imagination of the time. 

The murder takes place by night and it is notable that 
the Scottish proclamations dwell particularly on the depth 
of the night, its deadness and the intensity of its silence, 
and the solitariness of the victim. They speak of the crime 
as "The horrible and unworthy murder of the King, our 
Sovereign's late father, committed under silence of night 
within his own lodging by James, Earl of BothwelP." This 
is only one example, but I could quote many more; the 

1 The Cardinal of Lorraine was supposed to have instigated the 
Darnley murder. 2 j yi. 

^ Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, July 9th, 1567. 

5—2 



68 Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

phrase "under silence of night" is, in fact, repeated like 
a refrain in nearly all the proclamations: it was, again, one 
of the details that impressed contemporaries most. 

So in Macbeth the silence of the night is made particularly 
and horribly prominent. It is one of the details we are 
never allowed to forget^. 

Didst thou not hear a noise? 

Macbeth asks and is answered : 

I heard the owl scream, and the crickets cry, 

and in his own soliloquy he speaks of the intense deadness 

of the night: 

Now o'er the one half-world 
Nature seems dead. 

Lady Macbeth, listening in an. agony of apprehension, 
hears nothing but the screaming of the owl. 

Before the murder took place there occurred, according 
to Buchanan and others, a conversation between Mary and 
Bothwell in her chamber. Buchanan says^: 

After that she was come into her chamber, after midnight, 
she was in long talk with Bothwell, none being present but 
the captain of her guard. And when he also withdrew himself, 
Bothwell was there left alone, without other company, and 
shortly after retired into his own chamber. 

Now, as I have pointed out before, there is no mention 
of any such colloquy in Holinshed, either in the Macbeth 
tale or in the murder of Duff, yet, as everyone will agree, 
it is one of the most tragic and terrible scenes in Shakespeare. 
The leading motive is surely to be found in the passage from 
Buchanan I have quoted^. 

Another important point may be observed here. As I 
have said, Shakespeare sweeps away the blood-feuds which 

1 II. i, ii. 2 Detection. ' See also Chap. vii. 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 69 

are so prominent in Holinshed; Duff is inspired by such 
blood-feuds and so is Holinshed's Lady Macbeth ; HoHnshed's 
Lady Macbeth is also inspired by personal ambition : 

speciallie his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as 
she that was verie ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire 
to bear the name of a queen. 

Shakespeare sweeps away this motive also and substitutes 
Lady Macbeth's ambition for her husband. Now this is a 
much more unselfish motive and it certainly does resemble 
the history, for Bothwell had, as Robertson has shown, an 
insatiable ambition and Mary did particularly desire to 
gratify it. 

The murder takes place while the victim is in his bed; 
it thus combines the maximum of meanness in the crime 
with the maximum of helplessness in the victim. 

Now in the case of Darnley it was precisely this peculiar 
combination of circumstances, the murder of a helpless, 
sleeping man in his own bed, which most horrified con- 
temporaries, as we can see by scores of references in the 
proclamations and elsewhere^. Nor was this all! Two 
sleeping servants had been killed with the king and this 
was rightly regarded as a dreadful exaggeration of the 
horrible deed. Thus Pitcairn^ recounts that on March 25th, 
1567, the prisoners were accused of 

the shameful, treasonable and abominable slaughter and 
murder of the late King's grace, father to our sovereign 
lord, in his own lodging for the time... where he was lying in 
his bed, taking the night's rest... also for the cruel slaughter 
and murder of the late William Taylor, his grace's servitor, 
and the late Andrew Macaig treasonably... under silence of the 
night. 

^ Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 1567. 
2 Ancient Scottish Criminal Trials. 



70 Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

We may also compare the contemporary poem, the 

Legend of Mary, Queen of Scotland'^: 

A traitorous death by train of powder laid 
Whilst he in bed his heedless bones did reste. 

In dead of night, a time for treason's best, 
When he and his with sleep were now opprest; 
Then was his life bereft. 

The Oration lays stress on the same fact, "they kept the 
keys of the upper room that the murderers might come to 
the King in his bed." 

It is notable that in Macbeth there is mention of a drink 
for Macbeth immediately before the murder takes place: 

Go bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready, 
She strike upon the belP. 

So we read in the testimony of George Dalgleish^: 

So soon as my lord came to his lodging he cried for a drink 
and incontinent thereafter took ofi his clothes and went to his 
bed and lay there by the space of half-an-hour or thereby. 

So Macbeth returns to his bed after the murder and then 
pretends to be aroused from sleep. Lady Macbeth says: 

Get on your nightgown, lest occasion call us, 
And show us to be watchers. 

Then when Macduff asks: "Is thy master stirring?" he 
answers his own question by saying: 

Our knocking has awaked him; here he comes. 

The drama exactly resembles the Darnley murder where 
Dalgleish deposed: "Hacket came to him (i.e. Bothwell) in 
great fright; and incontinent my lord rose and put on his 
clothes... and... departed forth of the chamber." 

^ Attributed to Wenman, ^ ii. i. ^ pitcairn. 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 71 

No mention is made in Holinshed of a drink being ready, 
or of the murderer returning to bed and pretending to sleep, 
or of his being roused. 

The terrible incident of the knocking at the door, making 
such a clamour in the night, which is justly regarded as 
having such an appalling effect in the tragedy, simply does 
not occur in the literary source at all; but it occurs twice 
over in the Darnley murder, once when Bothwell knocked 
with a clamour which roused people on the gate of the Kirk 
in the Field, leading to poor Darnley, and once when his 
servant roused him. 

The door on which the knocking took place is prominently 
shown in the Record Office contemporary design of the 
Darnley murder 1. 

In Macbeth there are two servants who lie in a room a 
little apart. Macbeth says: 

There 's one did laugh in 's sleep, and one cried " Murder ! " 
That they did wake each other : I stood and heard them : 
But they did say their prayers, and address 'd them 
Again to sleeps. 

Lady Macbeth answers: 

There are two lodg'd together. 

So in Nelson's deposition^ we read: "he lay with Edward 
Symons in the little gallery, that went direct to the South out 
of the king's chamber." 

The two lodged apart are, be it observed, quite different 
servants from the two murdered with Duncan, for the latter 
are in the king's bedchamber. 

The parallel with the Darnley murder is curiously exact, 
for in the Darnley story two servants were killed with the 
king and the two lodged apart survived to give evidence. 

^ Museum of the Record Office. " ii. ii. ^ Pitcairn. 



72 Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

Hepburn's deposition^ is also exceedingly interesting as a 
commentary upon this part of Macbeth : 

Bothwell, on coming in, immediately called for a drink, and 
taking off his clothes went to bed in which he remained about 
half-an-hour, when a messenger came to the gate, knocking, 
and was admitted. 

"What is the matter? " said Bothwell to him. 

"The King's house," he answered, "is blown up and I trow 
the King is slain." 

"Fie! Treason!" cried out Bothwell; and then he rose and 
put on his clothes. Thereafter the Earl of Huntley and many 
others came to him and they went to the queen's chamber. 

Here we surely have the closest parallels with Macbeth; 
the drink, the taking off of the clothes, the pretence of 
sleep, the knocking at the door, the cry of "Treason!" 

In the drama it is Macduff who first cries "Treason!"; 
but Macbeth, exactly like Bothwell, pretends the utmost 
concern and horror. 

In the drama we have Macbeth's statement that none will 
dare to impugn the deed because the doers have all the 
power. Macbeth asks^: 

Will it not be received, 
When we have mark'd with blood those sleepy two 
Of his own chamber and used their very daggers, 
That they have done 't ? 

And Lady Macbeth answers : 

Who dares receive it other. 
As we shall make our griefs and clamour roar 
Upon his death? 

This impudence and audacity were exactly paralleled in 
the Darnley trial; thus we read in the confession of the 
Laird of Ormistown that Bothwell said to him: "none dare 
find fault with it when it shall be done." 

^ Pitcairn. 2 j y[{ 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 73 

The heavy sense that no one dared speak for justice was 
the burden that weighed upon all men's minds in the 
Darnley murder. We read in the Spanish State Papers, 
April 2ist, 1567: 

the trial took place on the day appointed, namely, the 12th, 
and no accuser or witness appeared against the Earl, who was 
acquitted by the majority of the judges, who were ordered by 
the Queen to declare their j udgment ; but the rest of them would 
not vote as they considered the trial was not free, the Earl of 
Bothwell having large forces with him and Lennox being 
ordered to bring not more than six horsemen. For this reason 
there was no one to bring or support the charge. 

It was, of course, the Earl of Lennox, the king's father, 
who was the chief accuser and it is notable that one of the 
chief accusers in Macbeth is made a Lennox^. 

My former speeches have but hit your thoughts. 

Which can interpret further: only, I say. 

Things have been strangely borne. The gracious Duncan 

Was pitied of Macbeth : — marry, he was dead : — 

And the right- vahant Banquo walk'd too late; 

Whom, you may say, if 't please you, Fleance kill'd. 

For Fleance fled : men must not walk too late. 

Who cannot want the thought how monstrous 

It was for Malcolm and for Donalbain 

To kill their gracious father ? damned fact ! 

How it did grieve Macbeth ! did he not straight 

In pious rage the two deUnquents tear. 

That were the slaves of drink, and thralls of sleep? 

Was not that nobly done ? Ay, and wisely too ; 

For 'twould have angered any heart aUve 

To hear the men deny 't. 

This is almost exactly the attitude of Lennox in 
the actual history of the Darnley case; he was the 
chief accuser, but he dared not speak openly because the 
Court was packed with Bothwell's adherents and Lennox's 

^ II. iii; III. vi. 



74 Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

own men had been expressly limited in numbers. The 
Lennox in the play also ardently desires help from England 
and so did the actual Lennox of history. The bitter irony 
and the powerlessness are the same both in the history and 
in the drama. 

Now in Holinshed there is no mention of any Lennox who 
is an accuser, and why should Shakespeare introduce this 
person and bring him prominently forward unless he is 
deliberately pointing the way to the Darnley murder? 

As an example of the manner in which enquiry was 
suppressed we may recall the letter which Kirkaldy of 
Grange wrote to the Earl of Bedford: 

She (i.e. Mary) is so past all shame that she has caused make 
an Act of Parliament against all them that shall set up any 
writing that shall speak anything of him (i.e. Bothwell)i. 

We read the same thing in a list of Memoranda by Cecil 
intended as instructions for Lord Grey, April 25th, 1567. 

The messenger is to inform her (i.e. Mary) that the Queen 
daily finds from all parts a general misliking conceived that as 
yet no discovery is made of the malefactors, but that which 
is most misliked is that they are such as by common fame have 
been most favoured. 

The hallucination of the dagger plays an important part 
in Macbeth. 

It seems to me more than probable that it was suggested 
by the illustrations of the Darnley murder which were 
current at the time. Thus in the Calendar of Scottish State 
Papers there is an Allegorical Sketch in colour which re- 
presents the queen, naked to the waist, as a mermaid. 

Below within a circle surrounded by 17 swords or daggers, 
points outwards a hare or rabbit I H above. Indorsed (by 
Drury) the people's appljdng of this I H is for Bodevill, John 
Hepborne. There was also a rude copy of the same with 
mottoes: "Spe illecto inani, Timor undique clades." 

1 State Papers, Foreign Series. 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 75 

If one desired a motto for Macbeth one could hardly find 
a better one than this ; he certainly did find his hope vain 
and himself surrounded by fear and slaughter. 

There is also a contemporary plan of the Darnley murder, 
already alluded to, which is preserved in the Record Office^, 
and which shows different stages of the murder. In one of 
these stages the bodies of the king and his servant are shown 
and above them, represented as if floating in the air, is a 
dagger. 

We may compare this with what Drury says of Bothwell 
after the murder ^i 

His followers to the number of fifty follow him very near, 
their gesture as his is much noted. His hand, as he talks to 
any that is not assured to him upon his dagger with a strange 
countenance. 

Three such examples are sufficient to show that con- 
temporary opinion regarded the dagger, pre-eminently the 
weapon of the assassin, as in some sort a symbol of Bothwell. 

Mr Hubert Hall informs me that contemporary docu- 
ments, of one kind or another, were copied very freely and 
passed from hand to hand. I think it more than probable 
that the famous dagger hallucination in Macbeth was sug- 
gested by the design preserved in the Record Office (or some 
variant of it) with the assassin's dagger floating in the air; 
a further confirmation of this is suggested by the fact that 
another compartment contains a picture of a very heavily 
barred postern, representing the Kirk of the Field's portal, 
Bothwell's knocking on which caused such an outcry^. 

A third compartment contains a picture of a child with 
the inscription: "Judge and avenge my cause, O Lord!" 
a broken branch lying by the dead bodies. 

^ Also in Print Room of British Museum. 

2 Quoted by Hay Fleming. ^ Pitcairn. 



76 Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

This corresponds very closely to a later scene in Macbeth'^, 
it resembles one of the avenging figures shown to Macbeth 
by the witches, namely, the third apparition : a child crowned 
with a tree in his hand. Macbeth enquires: 

What is this 
That rises like the issue of a king, 
And wears upon his baby-brow the round 
And top of sovereignty? 

Now none of these three things are found in Shakespeare's 
literary source; Holinshed has no mention of a dagger, no 
barred portal, no reference whatever to a child crowned and 
holding the broken branch of a tree, and I find it quite 
incredible that all three resemblances can have come by 
accident; we find the dagger in the air pointing the way 
towards the murdered bodies, just as in Macbeth it points 
the way towards Duncan ; in some of the designs we find it 
flecked with blood; there is also the prominent position 
given to the barred portal, the knocking on which played 
such an important part in the murder and which suggests 
the gate and the knocking on the gate in Macbeth, and there 
is the child who is crowned, obviously typifying the infant 
king, with the broken branch which typifies either the tree 
under which Darnley's body was found or the broken branch 
of Darnley's life or, more probably, both together. 

Such designs played a prominent part at the time, for one 
of them was used on the banner of the Confederate Lords 2. 

I must repeat that I think the Record Office design, or 
some variant of it, an important source for Macbeth; it 
makes very prominent the dagger in the air, the barred 
portal and the child crowned, all of which play such an 
important part in Macbeth and none of which are found in 
Holinshed. 

^ IV. i. ^ See Hamlet and the Scottish Succession. 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 77 

All three also illustrate what I said in the Introduction, 
that the mentality of the time very naturally and very 
easily turned history into symbolism. 

I really cannot imagine how closer parallels could be 
dramatised and put on the stage. 

We may observe that the Scottish Act of Parliament de- 
posing Mary accuses her of a similar part in the deed to 
that of Lady Macbeth and a similar dissimulation : 

she was privy, airt and pairt of the actual desire and deed of 
the foresaid murder of the King... our said sovereign lord's 
mother with the said James, sometime Earl of Bothwell, went 
about by indirect and coloured means to colour and hold back 
the knowledge of the truth of the committers of the said crime. 

Exactly as in Macbeth, however, the real truth was sus- 
pected. 
The Act continues : 

Yet all men in their hearts were fully persuaded, of the 
authors and devisers of that mischievous and unworthy fact, 
awaiting while God should move the hearts of some to enter 
on the quarrel for revenging of the same.... 

Now, I have already pointed out that in Shakespeare's 
literary source, i.e. Holinshed, there is not this immediate 
anger against Macbeth because Macbeth reigns excellently, 
and with the full consent of his subjects, for the greater 
part of his seventeen years reign. 

Here again Shakespeare departs from his literary source 
and closely resembles the history. 

Another peculiar phrase that is repeatedly employed in 
the Darnley murder is the phrase as to the "cleansing" of 
Bothwell which, again, is a parallel with Macbeth. 

Go get some water, 
And wash this filthy witness from your hand^, 

1 II. ii. 



78 Macbeth and the Damley Murder 

and again: 

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
Clean from my hand ? 
and 

A little water clears us of this deed. 

The contemporary parallels run^ April 13th, 1567: 

James Earl Both well has set up a writing subscribed with 
his hand that he was "cleansed" of the king's murder. 

On April 20th Kirkaldy of Grange writes to Bedford 
"that the Queen caused ratify in Parliament the cleansing 
of Bothwell." No such word is used in Holinshed nor is 
there a reference to any such ceremony. 

The disgrace of the unpunished murder is dwelt upon both 
in the play and in the contemporary records. 

Thus the Spanish State Papers^ say of Murray: 

The Earl. . .arrived here. . . .He said he did not intend to return 
until the Queen had punished the persons concerned in her 
husband's death, as he thought it was unworthy of his position 
to remain in a country where so strange and extraordinary a 
crime went unpunished. 

On March 8th Killigrew writes to CeciP: 

1 see... a general misliking among the Commons, and some 
others who abhor the detestable murder of their King, a shame 
as they suppose to the whole nation. 

The fame of it is dispersed through the whole world as 
a disgrace. We read in Cecil's Memoranda of April 25th in- 
structions for messages that "the Queen of Scots may under- 
stand what manner of bruits and rumours are spread through 
all countries concerning the said fact" (i.e. the king's 
murder) . Melville says in his Memoirs : 

^ Calendar of Scottish State Papers. 

2 Simancas Archives. ^ State Papers, Foreign Series. 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 79 

All Scotland cried out upon the foul murder of the King. 
But few of them were careful how to get it revenged, till they 
were driven thereto, by the crying out of all other nations 
generally against Scottishmen, wherever they travelled either 
by sea or by land. 

There is also a letter from the Scottish lords to the king of 
France : 

Votre Majeste nous a remonte ceste promesse, nous mettant 
devant les yeux la grande hunt que ce nous seroit a jamois, si 
un faict si enorme, perpetre en la persone du roy, demeurast 
casche. Ceste remonstrance, joincte avec tant d'advertisse- 
ments que nous recevons de jour a autre, des Escossois qui sont 
espars par les pays estrangers, nous a servy d'esperon pour 
nous faire enterprendre lenquest dudict meurtre, qui par trop 
a este differe, de sorte que toute ceste nation en est aucune- 
ment dishonore. Len la nous mande de tons cestes que les 
Escossois, tant en France qu'alheurs, se sentent tant inter- 
ressees, oyans taxer toute la nation que pour honte ils n'osent 
montre le visage; ains sont contraincts quasi de desadvouer 
leur patrie, voyants la nonchallance ou connivence de ceux a 
qui le faict touchoit le plus. 

The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland repeatedly 
contains proclamations to the same effect: 

it behoved them (i.e. the lords) to take arms to punish and 
revenge the said shameful murder wherewith this whole realm 
and lieges thereof were slandered and defamed. 

Again in 1567 we have the Bond of the Scottish Nobles^: 

Since the horrible murder of the King, the Queen's Majesty's 
husband, is so odious not only before God, but also to the whole 
world, with continual infamy and shame to this realm if this 
same murder shall not be punished accordingly. . .the plague of 
God shall not depart from the country or town where innocent 
blood is shed, before the same shall be cleansed by shedding 
the blood of the offenders. 

1 Calendar of Scottish State Papers, 



8o Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

Again on March loth we have news from France^: 

On the 23rd there arrived one by whom they understood all 
the manner of the Scottish King's death. It astonished the 
King here so that counsel was given that the Scottish guard 
should be cassed for a suspicion conceived by the deed of the 
nation's infidelity. 

We see from the above extracts that there is the clearest 
contemporary evidence to the effect that the murder of 
James' father was considered as having disgraced Scotland 
in the eyes of all Europe and that it gave the Scots a bad 
reputation everywhere and even caused the disbanding of 
the Scottish guard in France. 

Now this is the situation that is dwelt upon with such 
burning passion in Macbeth. 

In the mouth of Macbeth himself we have an anticipation 
of the unutterable infamy that will accompany his deed^ : 

pity, like a naked new-born babe, 
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed 
Upon the sightless couriers of the air, 
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, 
That tears shall drown the wind. 

The metaphor of "pity like a naked new-born babe " seems 
suggested by James himself, since pit}^ for the infant prince 
certainly was a main motive urged against the criminals, and 
the infant prince appealing to heaven for justice plays a 
prominent part in contemporary pictures, i.e. that on the 
banner of the Confederate Lords, in the Record Office print 
already alluded to etc., etc.; the sweeping of the "horrid 
deed" abroad on the air is almost exactly the language of 
the proclamations. 

One curious point may be considered here. 

As we have seen, the night of the murder is described as 
being intensely still ; but, when the night is described af ter- 
1 State Papers, Foreign Series. ^ i. vii. 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 8i 

wards, we are told that it has been tempestuous almost 
beyond human memory. 

On the one hand we have the absolute stillness : 

Now o'er the one half -world 
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse 
The curtain'd sleeps. 

And Lady Macbeth's : 

I heard the owl scream, and the crickets cry. 

It is impossible to imagine a stillness more deep. 
And yet this night has also seen a tempest without 
parallel. Lennox says^: 

The night has been unruly; where we lay, 

Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say, 

Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death. 

And prophesying with accents terrible 

Of dire combustion and confus'd events 

* * * some say the earth 

Was feverous, and did shake. 

Now surely it is strange how a night so intensely still that 
Lady Macbeth hears only the owls and the crickets and that 
Macbeth feels the whole world dead, surely it is strange how 
a night so calm should also be the night of a terrific tempest 
when chimneys are blown down and the night of an earth- 
quake? Macbeth admits: 

'twas a rough night, 
and Lennox answers: 

My young remembrance cannot parallel 
A fellow to it. 

A contradiction so acute seems to me only explicable on 
the ground that Shakespeare is really writing symbolism: 
the "silence of the night" really is the silence of the night 

^ II. i. 2 II. iii. 

w. M. 6 



82 Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

which surrounds the murder of the unhappy king of Scotland, 
referred to with horror in proclamation after proclamation : 
" the horrible and unworthy murder of the King. . .committed 
under silence of the night within his own lodging^." 

On the other hand, the dreadful tempest which carries 
the news to every land seems to me to be just as plainly the 
disgrace of it as published to the whole world or as the 
Articles of the Kirk (July 25th, 1567) put it "with continual 
infamy and shame to this realm if this same murder shall 
not be punished accordingly." 

It is worthy of note that neither the silence of the night 
nor the tempest occur in Holinshed who refers neither to 
the one nor the other; certain dread phenomena do occur 
in the murder of Duff but not these. 

The passage about the earth being feverous and shaking 
is another that seems to refer quite obviously to the Darnley 
murder, for the explosion of the gunpowder was referred to 
several times in the trial as making the ground shake like 
an earthquake and also making a similar noise. 

^ July 9th, 1567, July 2ist, 1567, etc., etc. 



CHAPTER IV 

MACBETH AND THE DARNLEY MURDER [cont) 

In addition to the immediate details of the Darnley 
murder there are also other portions of Macbeth which 
appear to have been suggested by the elder Both well. 

Thus we have the accusations of lechery which are so 
repeatedly brought against Both well : 

"He was brought up," says the author of the Oration, "in 
the Bishop of Murray's palace... in drunkenness and whore- 
domes, amongst most vile ministers of dissolute misorder." 

"After that he was grown to man's estate at dice and among 
harlots he wasted a most goodly revenue of his inheritance... 
he defiled other men's houses with cuckolddome....As for ex- 
cessive and immoderate use of lechery, he therein no less sought 
to be famous than other men do shun dishonour and infamy." 

Compare what is said of Macbeth ^r 

I grant him bloody, 
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful. 
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin 
That has a name. 

We have no parallel in Holinshed for the lechery; his 
Macbeth reigns admirably for ten years and then, his con- 
science pricking him, becomes a bloody tyrant; but he is 
not accused of lechery. Also we may observe he does for 
ten years rule far better than Duncan ever did, as is generally 
acknowledged, and passes excellent laws. 

Shakespeare's Macbeth, after the murder is once com- 
mitted, never shows any virtues and never possesses an 
hour of ease; this corresponds very closely to the actual 

^ IV. iii. 

6—2 



84 Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

history where Bothwell was at once suspected and had no 
interval of contentment or of good reputation. 

Macbeth is repeatedly called a "bloody tyrant" and so 
is Bothwell. Thus we have in the State Papers, July 21st, 
1567, concerning Bothwell: 

No counsellors of the realm had liberty of free speech or 
surety of their own life if they should in council resist the 
inordinate affections of that bloody tyrant. 

Compare this with Macbeth ^i 

O nation miserable, 
With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter'd, 

and also^ 

There 's not a one of them but in his house 
I keep a servant fee'd, 

which shows a similar grip over the nobles. 

Both Bothwell and Macbeth are stated to have broken 
men for servants: the Memoranda of Cecil, April 25th^ state: 

It is commonly said that the Earl of Bothwell was the 
principal author of the King's death... and that Bothwell's 
servitors, being broken men, were the cause of it. 

"Bothwell's servants," says Buchanan in the Detection, 
"were robbers, pirates and thieves." 

We may compare this with the scene where Macbeth in- 
structs the murderers of Banquo, the Second Murderer says* : 

I am one, my liege, 
Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world 
Have so incens'd that I am reckless what 
I do to spite the world. 

and the First Murderer responds : 

And I another, 
So weary with disasters, tugg'd with fortune. 
That I would set my life on any chance. 
To mend it, or be rid on 't. 

1 IV. iii. 2 III. iv. 2 State Papers, Foreign Series. * in. i. 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 85 

It is sufficiently obvious from this that Macbeth's fol- 
lowers are broken men and outlaws. 

These references to broken men and outlaws certainly do 
not occur in Holinshed. We may remember in this con- 
nection that the historic Bothwell was accused of piracy, 
and on this charge was imprisoned in Denmark for ten years 
before his death. 

Again Bothwell's servants, when they were not "broken 
men," were usually unwilling and, in the conflict with the 
Scottish lords, they had not their hearts in the fight. 
Melville states in his Memoirs: "The Earl Bothwell con- 
vened a great number but they came unwillingly"; "so 
many as came had no hearts to fight in that quarrel"; and 
again "Part of his own company detested him." 

We have exactly similar circumstances in Shakespeare's 
Macbeth'^ : 

Both more and less have given him the revolt; 
And none serve with him but constrained things, 
Whose hearts are absent too, 

and again : 

This way, my lord; the castle's gently render 'd: 
The tyrant's people on both sides do fight 2. 

Another interesting correspondence lies between Both- 
well's hesitation to join in single combat and Macbeth's 
similar hesitation. 

On April 13th, 1567, we have a proclamation: 

The Earl of Bothwell having offered to fight according to the 
law of arms any gentleman undefamed who dares to say that 
he is not innocent... the writer offers to prove by the same law 
of arms that he was the chief and author of the foul and horrible 
murder^. 

1 V. iv. 2 V. vii. ^ State Papers, Foreign Series. 



86 Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

This challenge was not accepted. Buchanan also notes 
Bothwell's unfulfilled offer of single combat: 

A notice was put up that... though Bothwell had been law- 
fully cleansed of the murder... he was ready to try it in combat; 
if any man of good fame and a gentleman born would charge 
him with the murder of the king. 

The Oration makes it a bitter taunt against Bothwell that 
he refused: 

And when there were many on the other side of honorable 
birth and estates, that offered to accept the combat, by and 
by his violent heat cooled and his glorious speech failed. 

We may compare this with the scene in Macbeth''- ; Macbeth 
is willing to fight Macduff if he really has a charm against 
him; but, when he finds the charm does not hold, he 
declines : 

I'll not fight with thee. 

and has to be taunted by Macduff : 

Then yield thee, coward. 
And live to be the show and gaze o' the time: 
We'll have thee, as our rarer monsters are. 
Painted upon a pole, and underwrit, 
"Here may you see the tyrant." 

It is only by such taunts that Macbeth can be goaded to 
fight; his failure of courage in such a crucial moment has 
been blamed by some commentators as improbable; but it 
is the feeling of Macbeth 's guilt which unnerves his arm, 
and probably in the history also it was the feeling of guilt 
which unnerved Bothwell and made a man naturally 
courageous behave in one case like a coward. There is no 
parallel to this refusal of the single combat in Holinshed; 
Macbeth and Macduff fight but Macbeth does not hesitate. 

1 v. viii. 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 87 

Bothwell, we may also observe, was repeatedly accused 
of witchcraft: 

On Feb. i6th, the morning after Darnley 's funeral, an anony- 
mous placard was found affixed to the door of the Tolbooth 
charging the Earl of Bothwell, Sir James Balfour etc.... with 
the murder of the king and that the queen was assenting thereto, 
through the persuasion of the Earl of Bothwell, and the witch- 
craft of the Lady Buccleugh^. 

We have also an interesting account of the way in which 
such matters were put into contemporary dramas : 

On May 14th, 1567, Drury writes to Cecil: "There has been 
an interlude of boys at Stirling of the manner of the King's 
death and the arraignment of the earl,... This was before the 
Lords, who the Earl thinks were devisers of the same.... It is 
thought that the witches and sorcerers have some credit for 
the appointment of the time of the marriage 2." 

Another striking parallel between the history and the play 

is to be found in the melancholy and sickness of the queen. 

On March 29th, 1567, Sir William Drury wrote to Cecil: 

the judgment of the people is that the queen will marry 
Bothwell. The Cardinal seems to mislike with her for the death 
of the King, She has been for the most part either melancholy 
or sickly ever since. 

Again on March 30th, Drury writes: "The Queen of Scots 
was troubled with some sickness, of which she is not yet all 
free^." Later on this melancholy developed into a desire for 
suicide : " Alone with Bothwell she was heard," says de Croc, 
"to call for a knife to slay herself*." "Only two days after 
the wedding," say the Spanish State Papers, "she cried for 
a knife that she might kill herself." De Silva was inclined to 

1 state Papers, Foreign Series, 

2 State Papers, Foreign Series. Cp. also Hamlet and the Scottish 
Succession. 

* State Papers, Foreign Series. 

* Quoted by Andrew Lang. 



88 Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

explain her misery by the maxim that "an evil conscience 
can know no peace." 

Even before Darnley's death we find that Mary had been 
supposed to have the falling sickness (i.e. epilepsy). 

Also on May 20th, 1567, Drury writes to Cecil: "It is 
thought the Queen has long had a spice of the falling sick- 
ness, and has been of late troubled therewith." 

Now here we surely have remarkable parallels with 
Macbeth. The queen has been full of resolution before the 
murder; but, afterwards, she falls into melancholy, she is 
suspected of the desire for suicide and she is subject to 
strange trances in one of which she walks and talks in her 
sleep. 

Macbeth speaks of^: 

the affliction of these terrible dreams 
That shake us nightly: 

implying that his wife, like himself, suffers torments of 
conscience. There is no doubt of the terrible melancholy of 
her last hours. Macbeth enquires 2; 

How does your patient, doctor ? 

and is answered: 

Not so sick, my lord, 
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies. 
That keep her from her rest. 

He replies: 

Cure her of that. 
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd; 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain; 
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, 
Cleanse the stuff 'd bosom of that perilous stuff 
Which weighs upon the heart? 

^ III. ii. 2 V. iii. 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 89 

Suicide is repeatedly suggested as a possibility^ : 

Look after her; 
Remove from her the means of all annoyance, 
And still keep eyes upon her, 

^^^ this dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen. 

Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands 
Took off her life. 

It seems to me more than probable that the wonderful 
and terrible scene of the sleep-walking was suggested by the 
idea of the epileptic trance; at any rate such phenomena 
are of frequent occurrence in epilepsy and closely associated 
with it. Here, as in the case of Bothwell's dagger, a historical 
parallel may well have been used by Shakespeare as a 
starting-point and have been elaborated by him into one of 
the most wonderful efforts of his imaginative genius. 

We note, as before, that none of these things occur in 
Shakespeare's literary source. Holinshed has no mention of 
the queen's melancholy or remorse, he says nothing of any 
desire for suicide, he has no reference to sleep-walking nor 
to anything whatever which might serve as a starting-point. 

If Shakespeare reaUy wished to dramatise history it is 
difficult to see how he could dramatise it better and more 
effectively. 

I propose to refer now to Holinshed's account of the 
murder of Duff by Donwald in order that the reader may 
compare it in detail with Macbeth and realise how much in 
the play is due to historical sources. 

Holinshed dates the event 968. 

He speaks of the king — Duff — being vexed by a strange 
sickness which was "no natural sickness, but by sorcerie 
and magicall art, practised by a sort of witches dwelling in 
a house of Mury land, called Fores." 

^ V. i. 2 V. viii. 



90 Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

Donwald, lieutenant of Forres, discovers the witches and 
has them put to death by fire. The king — Duff — thereupon 
recovers; he chases the rebels into Rosse and from Rosse 
into Caithness. He also puts to death some of the rebels 
who are relatives of Donwald's; this enrages the latter. 
Donwald's wife also has cause for anger against the king and 
persuades her husband to make away with him. 

I shall deal in the next chapter with the witch motive in 
Macbeth ; here I only wish 'o point out that there are several 
important motives in the murder of Duff by Donwald which 
differ greatly from Shakespeare's dramatic version; the king 
himself is a victim of art-magic, but that is a motive omitted 
by Shakespeare, who says nothing of the king pining away, 
nor does he say anything of the death of the witches by fire. 

Also, as we have pointed out before, the motive ascribed 
to Donwald and his wife is different; it is neither ambition 
on the husband's part nor wifely devotion on the wife's; in 
each case it is one of those blood-feuds or revenges for the 
murders of kinsmen which played such a large part in 
mediaeval history. Holinshed's Lady Macbeth had also a 
similar motive. Shakespeare drops out altogether these 
blood-feuds which give a sort of wild justice even to the 
crimes of Donwald and Lady Macbeth. He substitutes the 
more purely egoistic motives of ambition on the one side 
and personal affection on the other which exactly correspond 
to the motives of the history. 

To resume Holinshed's account of the murder : 

Donwald, thus being the more kindled in wrath by the words 
of his wife, determined to follow her advice in the execution 
of so heinous an act. Whereupon devising with himself for a 
while, which way he might best accomplish his cursed intent, 
at length got opportunitie and sped his purpose as foUoweth. 
It chanced that the king upon the daie before he purposed to 
depart forth of the castell, was long in his oratory at his prayers. 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 91 

and there continued till it was late in the night. At the last, 
comming forth, he called such afore him as had faithfully- 
served him in pursuit and apprehension of the rebels, and 
giving them hearty thanks, he bestowed sundry honourable 
gifts among them.... 

At length, having talked with them a long time, he got him 
into his privie chamber, onelie with two of his chamberlains, 
who having brought him to bed, came forth again and then fell 
to banqueting with Donwald and his wife who had prepared 
diverse delicate dishes, and sundry sorts of drinks for their 
rear supper or collation, whereat they sat up so long... that 
their heads were no sooner got to the pillow, but asleep they 
were so fast, that a man might have removed the chamber 
over them, sooner than to have awaked them out of their 
drunken sleep. 

Then Donwald, though he abhorred the act greatly in heart, 
yet through the instigation of his wife he called four of his 
servants unto him... they gladly obeyed his instructions and 
speedily going about the murder, they enter the chamber (in 
which the king lay) a little before cockcrow where they secretly 
cut his throat as he lay sleeping without any bustling at all 
and immediately by a postern gate they carried forth the dead 
body into the fields.... 

Holinshed goes on to narrate how the murderers deflected 
a small river, dug a hole in the bed of the stream, buried 
the body in the hole and then returned the stream to its 
course, so that the body might not betray Donwald by 
bleeding in his presence. 

Donwald slew the chamberlains as guilty of that heinous 
murder, and then like a madman running to and fro, he ran- 
sacked every corner within the castle... he burdened the cham- 
berlains, whom he had slain, with all the fault, they having 
the keys of the castle committed to their keeping all the night. 

Now here we have at once important parallels and im- 
portant differences. 

In the first place we observe that, as both Belleforest and 
Adam Blackwood had in Shakespeare's own day pointed 



92 Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 

out, there were close parallels between the Duff murder and 
the Darnley murder and therefore a large part of Macbeth 
is itself parallel with both. 

Similar in each case is the friendship between the victim 
and the murderers, the misplaced confidence of the victim 
who puts himself in the power of the murderers, the murder 
at night and in the bed, the murder of the two servants, 
the ascribing of the guilt to the innocent, and the murderer's 
pretended concern and pretended vengeance. 

We may observe here that, in Duff's murder, Donwald 
apparently contents himself with putting the guilt on the 
two grooms; but, in the Darnley murder, the real accusa- 
tions were, of course, laid by the Scottish lords against each 
other, and Shakespeare makes the suggested motive the 
suborning of the grooms by the king's sons — a motive not 
one whit more fantastic than the actual accusations brought 
in the history. 

The story of the disposal of the body of Donwald has no 
parallel in Macbeth, for Shakespeare omits it wholly. On 
the other hand he has made the parallel to the history much 
more close by introducing a number of motives which are 
not in Holinshed at all, but which are found in the history: 
ambition instead of revenge as the real cause of the murder, 
the passionate devotion of the woman to the man's ambition, 
the intense silence of the night, the conversation between 
the guilty pair in the chamber, the preparation of the drink, 
the wonderful motive of the dagger, the retiring to bed and 
pretending to be asleep, the wonderful motive of the knocking 
in the middle of the night, the curious detail of the tempest 
which is somehow simultaneous with a night of perfect calm, 
the use of the name of Lennox as one of the chief accusers, 
the detail that the "earth was feverous and did shake," the 
fact that Macbeth was licentious, that broken men and 



Macbeth and the Darnley Murder 93 

outlaws were his servants, that he tried to evade a challenge 
to single combat, that he was accused of witchcraft; all 
these make a formidable list of motives which are not in 
Holinshed, but are in the history ; we have others connected 
with the queen, her bitter remorse, her desire to commit 
suicide, her strange trances. 

Moreover in contemporary pictorial representations can 
be found three of the leading effects in Macbeth, the dagger 
floating in the air, the barred door on which the knocking 
takes place, and the child crowned and with a branch. 

When we remember that the murder of Duff had been 
already singled out by two of Shakespeare's contemporaries 
as the nearest parallel in Scottish history to the Darnley 
murder — it surely becomes sufficiently obvious what Shakes- 
peare is doing ; he takes the story which is the nearest possible 
parallel to the Darnley murder and then makes it more like 
by employing material which corresponds very closely to the 
actual details of the murder. It is the method which Hamlet 
employs in the Gonzago play; he chooses a story closely 
resembling the story of his father's murder and then makes 
the resemblance more close; it is the method which, I be- 
lieve, Shakespeare himself employs in Hamlet^. 

He employs it again in Macbeth. 

This is, I take it, the main reason for the inclusion of 
the murder of Duff by Donwald in an alien reign. 

^ See Hamlet and the Scottish Succession. 



CHAPTER V 

MACBETH AND FRANCIS, EARL BOTHWELL 

In Hamlet and the Scottish Succession I showed how Shake- 
speare had combined together the elder and the younger 
Bothwell into the one figure of Claudius ; he was attempting 
to dramatise Scottish History and it did not admit of 
dramatisation without condensation and compression. The 
figure of James I himself was, of all others, the figure most 
likely to interest his, i.e. Shakespeare's, audience; the crime 
of his father's murder was an extraordinarily dramatic 
crime, lending itself readily to treatment on the stage; so 
were James' own personal relations to the younger BothweU 
extraordinarily interesting; the two subjects made, however, 
infinitely better material if united in one drama and hence, 
I maintained, Shakespeare had united in one the parts of 
the two Bothwells and called them both Claudius. 

Now, it seems to me that a very similar method of con- 
struction has been followed in the case of Macbeth. Here 
also Shakespeare is mainly interested in the history of 
James I ; as we have seen he was probably writing the play 
for direct presentation before the king and at a moment 
when James had especial cause for apprehension. 

James quite seriously believed that he was the destined 
restorer of the Arthurian Empire, that prophecies centuries 
before his birth had announced the coming of a king who 
should unite the whole island under one crown. James 
quite seriously believed that, during the greater part of his 
life, he had been the object of special attention on the part 



Macbeth and Francis^ Earl Bothwell 95 

of the powers of evil : wizards, witches and wicked spirits of 
all kinds whose intention was, under the immediate direction 
of Satan himself, to prevent the Union of the Crowns. The 
king further believed that his personal enemy — the younger 
Bothwell — had been closely associated with these witches 
and wizards, had been aided, abetted and urged on by them 
in various attempts on the king's life, and he believed this 
on the definite evidence of the criminal trials themselves, 
on the sworn testimony of many witnesses and the decisions 
of the most eminent judges on the Scottish Bench^. 

It is not fair to accuse James of any special superstition 
because he believed in witches; the ministers of his Kirk, 
his most eminent judges, his Privy Council themselves, 
agreed with him. Moreover the Privy Council had recently 
ascribed the terrible though frustrated attempt of Gun- 
powder Plot to the evil spirits of Scotland, the same 
presumably who had tormented James in his earlier life. 

I believe that Shakespeare has blent these motives with 
the motives of the Damley murder. I have already shown 
how the motive of prophecy, in which James firmly believed, 
is interwoven in the play 2, and I will now proceed to show 
how the motives connected with Francis, Earl Bothwell are 
interwoven in the play. 

Francis, Earl Bothwell had an undoubted connection 
with witches and warlocks: Sir James Melville says in 
his Memoirs: 

About this time (i.e. 1591) many witches were tane in 
Lowdien who deponit of some attempts made by the Earl 
Bothwell, as they alleged, against his Majesty's person. Whilk 
comming to the said Earl's ears, he entered in ward within the 
Castle of Edinburgh desiring to be tried; alleging that the 
Devil, who was a liar from the beginning, nor yet his sworn 
witches ought not to be credited. 

^ Pitcairn's Ancient Scottish Criminal Trials. 2 Chap. i. 



96 Macbeth and Francis, Earl Bothwell 

Specially a renowned midwife called Anny Sampsown, 
affirmed that she, in company with nine other witches, being 
convened in the night beside Prestonpans, the devil their 
master being present standing in the midst of them; there a 
body of wax shapen and made by the said Anny Sampsown, 
wrapped within a linen cloth, was first delivered to the devil; 
which, after he had pronounced his verde, delivered the said 
picture to Anny Sampsown, and she to her next marrow, and 
so everyone round about, saying this is King James the sixt, 
ordered to be consumed at the instance of a nobleman, Francis, 
Earl Bothwell. 

Among the "articles of dittay " against Agnes Sampsown 
(Jan. 27th, 1590) which were in all fifty-three in number 
were the following : 

(12) Convict that she foreknew of the devil and told Patrick 
Porteous that he would live but eleven years. 

(33) Convict that the first time... she began to serve the devil, 
was after the death of her husband, and that he appeared 
to her in likeness of a man... after that he appointed time 
and place for their night meeting. 

(35) Convict... for sailing with certain of her accomplices... to a 
ship called the "Grace of God" in which she entered... and 
at her being there saw not the mariners, neither saw they 
her; and when they came away, the devil raised an evil 
wind, he being under the ship, and caused the ship to perish. 

(46) Describes how with a number of others she " raised storms 
to stay the Queen's home-coming to Scotland." 

Marion Leuchop was the person entrusted with the 
message: "Ye shall warn the rest of the sisters to raise the 
wind this day, at eleven hours, to stay the Queen's coming 
in Scotland." 

They were to "make the storm universal through the sea." 
Agnes Sampsown, it might be remarked, was executed. 

^ Pitcairn's Ancient Scottish Criminal Trials. 



Macbeth and Francis, Earl Bothwell 97 

Now here we surely have close parallels with Macbeth. 
We have the connection between James' most dangerous 
enemy — Francis, Earl Bothwell — and a witch and we have 
Earl Bothwell practising against the king's life by means of 
the witch; we have the witch employing the very practices 
of the witches in Macbeth, raising storms and so forth. 

With the "articles of dittay" against Agnes Sampsown 
we may compare the speeches in Macbeth''-. 

Second Witch. I '11 give thee a wind. 

First ,, Thou 'rt kind. 

Third ,, And I another. 

First ,, I myself have all the other, 

And the very ports they blow. 
All the quarters that they know 
I' the shipman's card. 

Agnes Sampsown and her comrades have the power to 
make people waste away; so have the witches in Macbeth^. 

Weary se'nnights, nine times nine 
Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine ! 
Though his bark cannot be lost, 
Yet it shall be tempest-tost. 

Agnes Sampsown and her comrades have the gift of 
prophecy just as the witches have in Macbeth. 

Francis, Earl Bothwell was again accused of complicity in 
witchcraft in the course of the trial of Euphemia Mackalzane. 
She was a lady of very good social position. Pitcairn sums 
up the subject: 

That a person, moving in the rank of society which Euphemia 
occupied, should have leagued with the obscure and profligate 
wretches who figure in the trials for witchcraft at this period, 
for the destruction of her sovereign, and that too by such un- 
likely and absurd means, seems irreconcilable with any ideas 
of sanity which can now be formed. It is evident, however, 

^ I. iii. ^ I. iii. 

w. M. 7 



98 Macbeth and Francis, Earl Bothwell 

that she beheved herself as well as her associates, to be possessed 
of supernatural powers; and that she had the firmest reliance 
in infernal agency. The only reason which can be assigned for 
such frantic and detestable conduct seems to be, that she was 
devoted to the ancient Roman Catholic faith, and thus bearing 
personal hatred against the King and the Reformed Rehgion; 
she was besides a zealous partisan of Bothwell and proved 
herself capable of using every means which he might suggest, 
or which she herself perversely considered to be most calculated 
to advance his interests and the predominance of her party. 
It is worthy of remark that three days before Ewsame's cre- 
mation, Bothwell "broke out of the Castle of Edinburgh" who 
had been there, in prison, some 20 days before, for alleged 
witchcraft and consulting with witches, especially with one 
Richard Grahame, to conspire the King's death; and upon the 
25th of June, the said Earl of Bothwell was forfaulted and 
intimation made thereof, by open proclamation at the cross 
of Edinburgh. It is known that Bothwell had much traffic with 
witches, and was himself esteemed an expert necromancer. 

This passage is important because it shows Bothwell 's 
legal connection with two more of the witches — Euphemia 
Mackalzane and Richar.d Grahame — and it shows that the 
Roman Catholic faith was a powerful impelling motive with 
some, at any rate, of these witches. 

Another interesting passage is to be found in the pro- 
clamation alluded to above by Pitcaim at Edinburgh, June 
25th, 1591, against: 

Francis, sometime Earl Both well,... his highness, perceiving 
that he has given himself over altogether into the hands of 
Satan, and this his spirit has so mightily prevailed into him 
that he yet still insists, without fear of God, or respect to 
honesty and shame of the world, to continue in all kinds of 
filthiness, heaping treason upon treason, against God, his 
Majesty, and this his native country, ever assisting such persons 
by force, counsel and otherwise, as were and are enemies to 
God, his highness, and sought the subversion of the true religion, 
taking the maintenance of traitors, murderers and other wicked 
persons, who to impetrate impunity of their wicked lives and 



Macbeth and Francis, Earl Bothwell 99 

liberty to do evil at all times, made their dependence upon 
him ; he having also now at last, for the better execution of his 
wicked intention and treasonable conspiracy against his Ma- 
jesty's own person, had consultation with necromancers, witches 
and other wicked and ungodly persons, both without and v/ithin 
this country, for bereaving of his highness' life, confessed by 
some of the same kind ...his Majesty now at last caused pro- 
nounce the Dome and Sentence of forfalture against him. 

Here again we surely have the closest parallels to Macbeth 
and the motives we are studying in Macbeth. Here, 
as before, Roman Catholicism is given as an impelling 
motive both for Francis, Earl Bothwell and for the witches. 
Earl Bothwell has given himself over "into the hands 
of Satan" and "his spirit has prevailed mightily into him"; 
he has "consultations with necromancers, witches and other 
ungodly persons" and plans with them the murder of a 
king. 

This is, surely, the essential idea of Macbeth which thus 
contains a close resemblance to Earl Bothwell's life. 

Macbeth also plans with the witches the murder of a king 
and Macbeth does not doubt that their inspiration is from 
the Powers of Darkness: 

And be these juggling fiends no more believed i. 

Neither does Banquo doubt that they are directly inspired 
by the powers of evil ^ : 

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm. 
The instruments of darkness tell us truths. 

Francis, Earl Bothwell takes upon himself the maintenance 
of " traitors, murderers and other wicked persons" who find 
impunity for their crimes through his protection, and this is 
exactly the situation in Macbeth for Macbeth has broken 
men for his servitors. 

^ V. viii. 2 j^ ijj^ 

7—2 



100 Macbeth and Francis, Earl Bothwell 

As we have seen, all the villains in Scotland do take 

Macbeth as their license to perpetrate crimes^: 

each new morn 
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows 
Strike heaven on the face. 

We may compare also Masson's Preface to the Register 
of the Privy Council of Scotland : 

The younger Bothwell was a Catholic and continually en- 
gaged in Catholic conspiracies 

It is from April 1591 that Bothwell steps forth... in that 
character of ringleader of new commotions and disorders in 
which he was to vex the souls of James and Maitland.... 

...On December 27th, 1591, he broke out where he was least 
expected,... actually within Holyrood Palace itself, battering 
at the doors of the King's chamber. 

...Nor had the King ever manifested such a passion of 
personal anger against any political culprit such a desire for 
real and severe revenge, as now against Bothwell. This cousin 
of his own... appears to have been to him an object of personal 
dread 

A sudden epidemic of diablerie seems to have broken out in 
and near Edinburgh during the King's absence in Denmark 
through the winter of 1589-90 and to have lasted through the 
whole of the next year and the next. 

No man of public mark, it appears, had been so deep in this 
witchcraft business as Bothwell, so intimate and incessant in 
consultations with the noted wizards and warlocks of the time, 
and especially with the warlock-in-chief Richie Grahame; and 
in that charge of high treason on which Bothwell had been 
arrested and imprisoned in April, 1591, and which had driven 
him into his subsequent course of wild rebellion, the main item 
had been his having conspired with such infernal agencies for 
the death of the King and for his own ambitions in the State 
as depending on that event 

Now here again we have an important development of 
the situation; we learn that Francis Earl Bothwell was the 
great centre of Catholic plots and conspiracies ; that no other 

^ IV. iii. 



Macbeth and Francis^ Earl Bothwell loi 

man of importance in the realm had been so conspicuous in 
" diablerie " as Bothwell and so frequent in his consultations 
with wizards and witches; like Macbeth he had hoped to 
slay the king by his necromancy and, also like Macbeth, 
he had hoped to gratify his own ambitions in the State by 
so doing. Again we have the king's personal hatred of 
Earl Bothwell, the most detested of all James' personal 
enemies, which would, of course, give Shakespeare an 
additionally strong motive for representing him before 
James. 
h We have the fact that he is a relative of the king's, a 

i cousin, and Duncan alludes to Macbeth in the same rela- 

^•^ tionship : 

O valiant cousin ! worthy gentleman ! 

In the fact that Bothwell had been in the habit of breaking 
inside the king's palaces, battering actually on the door of 
his chamber in Holyrood, we have perhaps a suggestion for 
the phrase in Macbeth'^: 

I hope the days are near at hand 
That chambers will be safe. 

Then again in the proclamation of June 25th, 1591, 
Francis Stuart is said to hold a title "to which he no ways 
succeeded by birth." James, in fact, gave him as a special 
grace the title of Earl of Bothwell and, as if that title had 
been fatal, he seemed to give with it the treachery and 
murderous propensities of the earlier holder of the title — 
the Hepburn. An exactly similar circumstance occurs in 
Macbeth; Macbeth fights against and vanquishes the rebel 
thane of Cawdor, he receives his title as a reward from the 
king and this very title serves him as a stepping-stone from 
which he proceeds to plan the murder of the king. 

^ V. iv. 



102 Macbeth and Francis^ Earl Both well 

Duncan says of Cawdor: 

go pronounce his present death. 
And with his former title greet Macbeth. 

Ironically enough it is this very title — thane of Cawdor — 
which makes Macbeth feel he can fulfil the further part of 
the witch's prophecy and obtain the throne. Many critics 
have commented on the tragic irony of this traitor's title 
being given to Macbeth who promptly turns traitor also; 
so a consultation of the Scottish State Papers shows how 
continually the men of that age dwelt on the fact that it 
was James himself who had given Francis Stuart this 
unlucky title — a title which seemed destined to be fatal to 
the royal house of Scotland. 

In a footnote on the affairs of 1591 Masson says: 

He (i.e. Bothwell) had already, in fact, mixed himself up a 
good deal with public affairs, become one of the most powerful 
men in the kingdom, and obtained a peculiar reputation for 
political waywardness and recklessness, and for dissipation and 
profligacy.... Agnes Sampsown and Richard Graham had testi- 
fied that he had consulted them as to the probable duration of 
the King's life, and what should happen to him after his death. 

Once more we have parallels with Macbeth, for the Macbeth 
of the later part of the drama is a singularly wayward and 
reckless person who passes from one rashness to another. 

Even the witches allude to Macbeth as "wayward^." 

And, which is worse, all you have done 
Hath been but for a wayward son. 
Spiteful and wrathful. 

Similarly Macbeth is profligate and given to every form 
of dissipation 2 : 

I grant him bloody. 
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful. 
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin 
That has a name. 

^ III. V. - IV. iii. 



Macbeth and Francis^ Earl Bothwell 103 

This description, as I have pointed out before, would 
apply also to the elder Bothwell; but then it was precisely 
the likeness between them which awakened the superstitious 
horror of the age. Macbeth, we may observe, was practically 
a madman in his later stages, and this appears to have been 
true also of Bothwell. 

Masson in his Introduction to the Register of the Privy 
Council of Scotland speaks of 

the weary business of the inextinguishable Bothwell. For 
fifteen months already this half -mad cousin of the King's, with 
no definable policy but the mere incarnation of general dis- 
content, had been a thorn in his Majesty's side... though chased 
again and again condemned and forfalted, he was still at large 

Once again there is the plain suggestion of motives for 
Macbeth; in the later stages of the play Macbeth becomes 
so frenzied that he does indeed seem half-mad. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE WITCHES IN MACBETH AND THE 
SCOTTISH WITCH-TRIALS 

We may observe that Shakespeare took but Httle of the 
material of his witch-scenes from Hohnshed. All that 
Holinshed gives is the witches' prophecy to Macbeth and 
Banquo. 

He says that the two generals were passing through 
"woods and fields" when in a "laund" (i.e. an open space) 
three women met them "in strange and wild apparel, re- 
sembling creatures of an elder world"; they give their pro- 
phecies to Macbeth and Banquo and then disappear. 

"Afterwards," says Holinshed, "The common opinion was, 
that these women were either the weird sisters, that is (as ye 
would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or 
feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necro- 
manticall science, bicause everie thing came to pass as they 
had spoken." 

Now this is absolutely aU Holinshed has to say on the 
matter; he gives no further details. 

All the wonderful and terrible details of the witch-scenes 
are added by Shakespeare himself, and I shall have no diffi- 
culty in showing that they correspond in the closest possible 
manner with the actual details of the Scottish witch-trials, 
especially those connected with Francis, Earl Bothwell. Not 
one of these details seems to be invented, on the contrary 
they are studied with an almost meticulous accuracy; but 
Shakespeare, here as elsewhere, is a master of selection and 
reveals his genius in an unrivalled power of tragic concen- 
tration and compression. 



The Scottish Witch-Trials 105 

It is notable that Bothwell's witches had famihar spirits. 

"Some of them," says Melville^, "show how that there was 
a westland man, called Riche Grame, who had a familiar spirit; 
the whilk Riche they said, could both do and tell many things 
chiefly against the Earl Bothwell. Whereupon the said Richard 
Graham was apprehended and brought to Edinburgh; who, 
being examined before His Majesty, granted that he had a 
familiar spirit that showed him sundry things," 

So also the witches possess familiar spirits 2. 

One says: "I come, Graymalkin!" and the other answers 
" Paddock calls," Graymalkin and Paddock being apparently 
the names of the familiars. 

Macbeth's witches also have dealings with "Hecate/' the 
"close contriver of all harms" who comes direct from "the 
pit of Acheron^." 

When they are brewing their hell-broth another spirit — 
Harpier — attends them*. 

Harpier cries, "'Tis time, 'tis time," and when Macbeth 
visits them, they ask him if he wishes to hear their pro- 
phecies from their own mouths or the mouths of their 
masters and he answers: "Call 'em; let me see 'em," upon 
which they summon the spirits. 

The witches in the Scottish criminal trials were accused 
of the gift of prophecy. Agnes or Anny Sampsown (tried 
January 27th, 1590) was, as we have seen, one of those most 
closely connected with Francis Stuart. Among the accusa- 
tions brought against her was this gift of prophecy. Thus 
the Articles of Dittay include : 

(13) That she was made foreknown of the devil, of the last 
Michaelmas storm, and that there would be great scathe, 
both by sea and land. 

(14) Item, that she was made foreknown by the spirit that the 
Queen's Majesty would never come in this country unless 
the king fetched her. 

^ Memoirs. ^ i. i. ^ in. v. "* iv. i. 



io6 The Witches in Macbeth and 

Now this is, of course, exactly the mechanism employed 
in Macbeth. The weird sisters throughout have the gift of 
prophecy; they know the issue of the battle and they 
know that Macbeth and Banquo are approaching before 
Macbeth and Banquo appear. They win Macbeth's con- 
fidence by prophesying to him that he will be thane 
of Cawdor, and so obtain a hold on him which incites 
him to his crime. Moreover it is quite obvious from 
the last of the witch-scenes^ that it is their attendant 
spirits and not they themselves who possess the gift 
of prophecy, smce in the passage already quoted they 
ask Macbeth if he will hear the future from them or from 
their masters. 

Agnes Sampsown as we have seen and the other Scottish 
witches were accused of raising storms and pursuing ships 
while themselves invisible. It was believed especially that 
the coming of Anne of Denmark had been delayed through 
these witch-raised storms. 

Article 46 describes how Agnes with a number of others 
"raised storms to stay the Queen's home-coming to Scot- 
land." 

The same accusations were brought against Euphemia 
Mackalzane^. • 

(25) Item. Indited and accused for a convention held by you 
and other notorious witches... where you and they took the 
sea, Robert Grierson being your admiral and master-man, 
past over the sea in riddles to a ship ; where you entered with 
the devil your master therein; when, after you had eaten 
and drunken you cast over a black dog that skipped under 
the ship, and thereby, ye having the Devil your master 
therein, who drowned the ship... whereby the Queen was 
put back by storm. 

^ IV. i. 

2 Pitcairn's Ancient Scottish Criminal Trials. 



the Scottish Witch-Trials 107 

Pitcairn in his A True Discourse of the Apprehension of 
Sundry Witches lately taken in Scotland (i.e. in 1591) writes: 

Againe it is confessed that the said christened cat was the 
cause that the King's Majesty's ship, at his coming forth of 
Denmark had a contrary wind to the rest of the ships then 
being in his company; which thing was most true and strange, 
as the King's Majesty acknowledged, for when the rest of the 
ships had a fair and good wind, then was the wind contrary 
and altogether against his Majesty; and further, the said witch 
declared that his Majesty had never come safely from the sea, 
if his faith had not prevailed above their intentions. 

Here we obviously have again the closest parallels with 
the witches in Macbeth. 
They are from the beginning associated with storms^: 

When shall we three meet again. 
In thunder, lightning or in rain? 

In a later scene ^ a witch tells how a sailor's wife has 
insulted her and how, like Euphemia, the witch means to 
sail after the husband in a sieve and, in the guise of an 
animal, "like a rat without a tail, " destroy him. In exactly 
the same way the Scottish witches sailed in sieves and 
either they or their spirits disguised themselves as animals, 
and so destroyed the ships. 

There is a perfectly similar incident to the vain attempt 
to destroy the king in the lines : 

Though his bark cannot be lost, 
Yet it shall be tempest-tost. 

The Scottish witches term themselves "sisters"; so, of 
course, do Macbeth's : 

Sister, where thou^? 

Betimes I will to the weird sisters*. 

1 I. i. 2 I iii 

^ I. iii. * III. iv. 



io8 The Witches in Macbeth and 

The Scottish witches can pass over the sea as well as the 
land ; so can those of Macbeth for they call themselves 

Posters of the sea and land^ 

Again Macbeth speaks of the terrific storms they raise ^i 

Though you untie the winds, and let them fight 
Against the churches; though the yesty waves 
Confound and swallow navigation up; 
Though bladed corn be lodg'd, and trees blown down; 
Though castles topple on their warders' heads. 

The association of cats with witchcraft has, of course, 
often been observed. They are mentioned in the extracts 
quoted above and repeatedly in Macbeth. Thus, in the first 
scene, there is a reference to "Graymalkin," a name for a 
cat and meaning, presumably, a spirit disguised as a cat; 
before the entrance of Macbeth the cat-spirit gives a signal^: 

Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd. 

The ingredients used in the hell-broth in Macbeth have 
also their close parallels in the Scottish witch-trials. 

Thus in the trial of Patrick Loucy^ (July 23rd, 1605) he 
was accused: 

Of consorting with one Janet Hunter, a notorious witch, and 
who was executed to the death for sorcery and witchcraft... 
which Janet and the said Patrick... convened themselves upon 
the common waste sandhills in Kyle. . .where the Devil appeared 
to them and conferred with them... there appeared to them a 
devilish spirit in likeness to a woman and calling herself Helen 
M'bune. 

...At diverse times thereafter they assembled themselves in 
diverse kirks and kirkyards; where the said Patrick and his 
associates aforesaid, raised and took up sundry dead persons 
out of their graves, and dismembered the said dead corpses 
for the practising of their witchcraft and sorcery. 

^ I. iii. 2 IV. i. 

2 IV. i. * Pitcairn. 



the Scottish Witch-Trials 109 

This trial is interesting as it had occurred only such a 
short time before the actual date of Macbeth. We see here 
the gathering of the witches on a waste place, the sandhills ; 
in Macbeth also they appear in a "desert place ^" and their 
next meeting is to be with Macbeth on a heath. A devilish 
spirit appears to them in the likeness of a woman, just as 
Hecate appears in Macbeth'^, and they dismember corpses 
for the purpose of their sorcery. The witches in Macbeth 
certainly do this. In the scene concerning the sailor and 
the storms^ we have the boast of the first witch: 

Here I have a pilot's thumb, 
Wreck'd as homeward he did come, 

and in the witch-broth* they boil : 

Liver of blaspheming Jew;... 
Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips; 
Finger of birth-strangled babe. 
Ditch-delivered by a drab. 

There does not seem much room for doubt that Bothwell 
and Richard Grahame had really tried to poison the king 
by means of such a hell-broth. 

Thus we have a trial in 159 1 for a "Wilful Error in 
Assise — that of Acquitting a Witch^": 

Barbara Napier was accused of seeking help from Richard 
Graham, a notorious sorcerer... and specially... for fear the 
Earl Bothwell should have entered in Edinburgh, she declared 
to the said Richard, that she heard a woman say, that our 
sovereign lord would get scathe by a toad or gangrell...who 
consulted with the spirit thereanent and received by his 
response, that his Majesty would be troubled by convention 
of women, through the dropping of a toad... there were as- 
sembled nine principals.... Agnes Sampsown proposed the de- 

^ I. i. 2 in. V. 3 J iii 

* IV. i, 5 Pitcairn. 



no The Witches in Macbeth and 

struction of his highness' person, saying to the Devil: "We 
have a turn ado, and we would fain be at it if we could and 

therefore help us to it The Devil answered he would do what 

he could, but it would be long to, because it would be thwarted, 
and... he ordered them to hang, roast and drop a toad and to 
lay the drops of the toad mixed with strong wash (i.e. stale 
urine) an adder skin, and the thing in the forehead of a new 
foaled foal in his Highness' way... wherever it might drop upon 
his Highness' head or body, for his Highness' destruction, that 
another might have ruled in his Majesty's place.... Margaret 
Thomsown was appointed to drop the toad. 

And the said Barbara was accused that she gave her bodily 
presence upon Allhallow evening last (1590) to the convention 
held at the Kirk, North-Berwick, where she danced along the 

kirkyard Agnes Sampsown and her daughter and all the rest 

following the said Barbara.... At the which place and time the 
women first paid homage, and were turned six times widder- 
shins about.... 

There were three dead bodies taken up and jointed; the 
nails and joints were parted amongst them; the Devil com- 
manded them to keep the joints upon them while the same 
dried and then to make a powder of them to do evil with. 

There are several points of comparison here. These 
witches also, we observe, belong to the Bothwell gang of 
diablerie. We observe also the peculiar prominence given 
to toads in their sorcery. This, of course, is equally true of 
Macbeth. In the opening scene ^ one of the spirits appears 
as "Paddock" (i.e. a toad), and it is the first ingredient to 
be thrown into the hell-broth^ : 

Round about the cauldron go ; 
In the poison 'd entrails throw. 
Toad, that under cold stone 
Days and nights hast thirty-one 
Swelter'd venom sleeping got, 
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot. 

Another ingredient used in this BothweU witch-trial is 
^ I. i. 2 IV. i. 



the Scottish Witch-Trials iii 

an adder skin and it is the second ingredient in the Macbeth 
hell-broth : 

Fillet of a fenny snake 
In the cauldron boil and bake ; 

and in addition there is the 

Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, 
and 

Eye of newt, and toe of frog. 

The dancing is another important element in the Bothwell 
witch-trial and in Macbeth' s witches. Bothwell's witches 
dance in multiples of three: "nine principals" and the 
number of their dances is in multiples of three "six times" 
and they also dance in contrary directions, " widdershins " 
or contrary to the course of the sun; the number of dead 
bodies jointed is "three." 

So in Macbeth we have the weird sisters dancing whenever 
they wish their charms to be particularly strong ; they dance 
when they meet Macbeth first and their dances are multiples 
of three : 

Thus do go about, about; 

Thrice to thine and thrice to mine 

And thrice again, to make up nine. 

Peace ! the charm's wound up. 

So also they dance when brewing the hell-broth^: 

Round about the cauldron go, 

and, when Hecate enters to meet the three witches, she says: 

And now about the cauldron sing. 
Like elves and fairies in a ring, 
Enchanting all that you put in, 

Both^well's witches held their assemblies mainly at night 

and Macbeth addresses his as 

You secret, black and midnight hags. 

1 IV. j. 



112 The Witches in Macbeth and 

It is important to remember that James himself had 
examined some of these witches and taken part in their 
trials. 

Pitcairn in the work already referred to, A True Discourse 
of the Apprehension of Sundry Witches lately taken in Scotland 
(1591), has the following references to the king's direct 
participation : 

...The King himself examined Agnes Sampsown...she con- 
fessed that upon the night of AUhallow E'en last, she was 
accompanied, as well with the persons aforesaide, as also with 
a great many other witches, to the number of two hundred, 
and that all together went to Sea, each one in a riddle or cive, 
and went into the same with flagons of wine, making merry 
and drinking by the way, in the same riddles or cives to the 
Kirk of North-Berwick in Lothian, and that, after they had 
landed, took hands on the land, and danced this reel or short 

dance, singing all with one voice Geillis Duncane went before 

them, playing this reel or dance, upon a small trumpe, called 
a Jew's trump, until they entered into the kirk of North- 
Berwick. 

...These confessions made the King in a wonderful admira- 
tion, and sent for the said Geillis Duncane, who upon the Hke 
trump did play the said dance before the King's Majesty. 

Here again we see the close relation to the motives of 
Macbeth; we have the sailing in sieves, the dancing and 
singing and we see that James himself was personally and 
deeply interested. 

In the same work we read : 

The Devil himself met them and did greatly inveigh against 
the King of Scotland, he received their oaths for their good 
and true service towards him and departed.... At which time, 
the witches demanded of the Devil, "Why he did bear such 
hatred to the King," who answered: "By reason the King is 
the greatest enemy he had in the world." 

Various people seem to have objected to James' presence 



the Scottish Witch-Trials 113 

at these witch-trials on the ground that it was very dan- 
gerous both for himself and his realm ; but the writer argues : 

It is well known that the King is the child and servant of 
God, and they but the servants of the Devil; he is the Lord's 
anointed and they but the vessels of God's wrath; he is a true 
Christian and trusteth in God; they worse than infidels for 
they only trust in the Devil, who daily serves them till he have 
brought them to utter destruction. 

We have here exactly the same idea as in Macbeth that the 
service of the powers of darkness is meant to lead men on 
to their doom. Banquo warns Macbeth : 

oftentimes, to win us to our harm, 
The instruments of darkness tell us truths. 
Win us with honest trifles, to betray 's 
In deepest consequence^, 

and Macbeth himself knows it before the end^: 

I pull in resolution, and begin 

To doubt the equivocation of the fiend 

That lies like truth. 

We are now in a position to see exactly what the Macbeth 
witch-scenes meant for James the First. 

(i) James believed that he had all his life been persecuted 
by the powers of evil, directly inspired by the Devil, who 
were determined to prevent his accession to the throne of 
England, because by this accession he would become the 
monarch of a United Great Britain and the head of a great 
Protestant empire. 

(2) These witches and powers of evil had been in league 
with the king's most hated personal enemy — Francis, Earl 
Bothwell — had helped him by prophesying future events 
and had egged him on to attempt the murder of the king. 

(3) Francis, Earl Bothwell, was more deeply involved in 

I. iii. 2 V. v. 

w. M. 8 



114 The Witches in Macbeth and 

the practices of witchcraft than any other man of rank in 
Scotland. 

(4) The Scottish witches associated, so it was beHeved, 
with evil spirits which appeared in the form of animals. 
Macbeth's witches also associate with evil spirits which 
appear in the form of cats and toads. 

(5) The Scottish witches associated with a devilish spirit 
in the form of a woman. So do Macbeth's witches associate 
with a devilish spirit in the form of a woman — Hecate. 

(6) The Scottish witches sailed on the sea in sieves. So 
do Macbeth's witches sail on the sea in sieves. 

(7) The Scottish witches had power to raise storms and 
tempests and attempted, though unsuccessfully, to destroy 
the king by this means. 

So also do Macbeth's witches raise storms and tempests, 

(8) The Scottish witches had the power of distressing 
vessels and sometimes sinking them. 

Macbeth's witches also have the power of distressing 
vessels and sometimes sinking them. 

(9) The Scottish witches made use of ceremonial dances, 
contrary to the course of the sun, "widdershins." Three 
and multiples of three were their sacred numbers. So also 
do Macbeth's witches make use of ceremonial dances ; three 
and multiples of three are their sacred numbers. 

(10) The Scottish witches dismembered dead bodies and 
used the portions in charms. So also do Macbeth's witches 
dismember dead bodies and use the portions in charms. 

(11) The Scottish witches employed toads and adders for 
purposes of sorcery. 

Macbeth's witches use toads and adders for purposes of 
sorcery. 

(12) The Scottish witches possessed the power of prophecy. 
Macbeth's witches possess the power of prophecy. 



the Scottish Witch-Trials 115 

(13) The prophetic gift of the Scottish witches was really 
due to their familiars. 

The prophetic power of Macbeth's witches is really due 
not to themselves but to their familiars. 

(14) The Scottish witches were in the habit of telling men 
half-truths and so obtaining influence over them. 

Macbeth's witches also tell him half-truths and so lead 
him on to his ruin. 

(15) The Scottish witches egged Bothwell on to murder 
the king by prophesying the king's death. 

So do Macbeth's witches egg him on to murder Duncan 
by prophesying his own accession. 

(16) The Scottish witches loved waste and desolate places 
like sandhills and heaths and were fond of meeting by night. 
So also do Macbeth's witches love waste and desolate places 
and so also are they fond of meeting by night. 

It seems to me that it would be hardly possible for 
Shakespeare to have concentrated more resemblances or 
closer resemblances in the brief space at his disposal. When 
we remember that these witch-trials were of special interest 
to James I, that Shakespeare was writing just after Gun- 
powder Plot and that the Privy Council of Scotland them- 
selves had told James that the plot was " excogitated " by 
evil spirits, we may feel sure that here also Shakespeare 
was making use ot historic material. 

The main aim of the Bothwell witches who were set on 
or supposed to be set on by the Roman Catholics was to 
prevent the Union of England and Scotland, and Gunpowder 
Plot also had been aimed at that Union. 

The demonstration seems to be complete. 

Note. It is worthy of note that Catherine de Medici was accused 
by the Huguenots of very similar witch-practices. An account of 
them even more horrible than the account I have given above will 
be found in D'Aubigne's Les Tragiques. 

See also Appendix A. o 



CHAPTER VII 

MACBETH AND THE MASSACRE OF 
ST BARTHOLOMEW 

I HAVE shown that, at the time Macbeth was written, the 
Massacre of St Bartholomew was much in the minds of the 
people of England because the Gunpowder Plot seemed to 
them to resemble that massacre and possibly to be a pre- 
cursor to one very similar. 

Now it seems to me that Shakespeare also has this parallel 
in mind and has applied it more than once in Macbeth. 

Compare, for one thing, the way in which the unhappy 
Charles IX wavered and was urged on by his mother with 
the taunt of cowardice. De Thou narrates 

The Queen went at midnight to the chamber of the king, 
fearing that he would change his resolution, because he seemed 
to her to waver and the atrocity of the action put him in doubt. 
The Queen, seeing that the king still hesitated, blamed him 
fiercely for losing by delay this magnificent opportunity of ex- 
terminating his enemies which God had given him. This Prince 
(Charles) who was very proud and accustomed to shed blood, 
feeling himself accused of cowardice, was angry at her discourse 
and commanded that the thing should be done. 

Now here we surely have very close parallels to Mac- 
beth', the woman urges the man to something which he 
has previously promised. No such interview and previous 
promise is recorded in the actual text of Macbeth, and its 
absence has been one of the standing problems of commen- 
tators who, in consequence, have assumed an interview not 
recorded in the play. 



Macbeth and the Massacre of St Bartholomew 117 

In the next place we have the woman dwelHng on the 
magnificent opportunity : 

Nor time, nor place. 
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both. 
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now 
Does unmake you^. 

There is the wavering and withdrawal of Macbeth and 
his plea for his victim : 

He hath honoured me of late : and I have bought 
Golden opinions from all sorts of people, 

and there is the woman's taunt of cowardice: "live a coward 
in thine own esteem," and the man's anger at the taunt: 

I dare do all that may become a man. 

Now all these circumstances show a close parallel to the 
history of St Bartholomew and not one of them occurs in 
the literary source — Holinshed. 

Holinshed says nothing of a previous promise given by 
the man, he says nothing of the man's wavering and hesi- 
tating; he does say that Macbeth's wife urged her husband 
on ; but he does not say that she used the taunt of cowardice, 
reminded him of his previous promise, and dwelt on the 
unrivalled excellence of the opportunity. 

De Thou says: 

The queen took advantage of his anger, and, still fearing 
that he would relent, gave a signal for the bell of St Germain 
L'Auxerrois to be sounded. 

So is the bell, we remember, the signal for the hesitating 
Macbeth who hears it with terror and with fear. 

The dreadful Catherine urged her son on to dissimulate. 
De Thou tells us that she informed Charles that the man 
who could not dissimulate was unworthy to be a king; her 

^ I. vii. 



ii8 Macbeth 2ind the 

son's soubriquet for her was "Madame la serpente." So in 
Lady Macbeth we have the passion for dissimulation^: 

To beguile the time, 
Look Uke the time; bear welcome in your eye, 
Your hand, your tongue : look like the innocent flower 
But be the serpent under 't. 

Then there is the hesitation of Lady Macbeth before the 
immediate presence of the deed and her curious statement 
that she would have killed Duncan herself had he not re- 
sembled her father; there is certainly no suggestion of this 
in Holinshed who says nothing of any hesitation and nothing 
of any likeness to a father. 

But there was a suggestion in the history of St Bartho- 
lomew; Catherine de Medici had been accustomed to address 
Coligny as "father" and she certainly did hesitate before 
his murder ; she had decided to countermand the order, but 
was told it was too late. 

Jean de Serres says: 

To the guilty plotters that was a sleepless night. Unable to 
rest quietly, at a little before dawn, Catherine with her two 

elder sons found her way to the portal of the Louvre They 

heard a pistol-shot.... Hastily they sent a servant to the Duke 
of Guise and countermanded the instructions of the evening 

and bade him do no injury to the admiral. It was too late 

The mother and her sons returned hastily to their former 
purpose. 

The striking on the bell plays a prominent part in Macbeth 
and everyone remembers the terrible incident in the massacre 
of St Bartholomew of the signal given by the sounding of 
the tocsin of St Germain L'Auxerrois. 

It was Catherine herself, as we have seen, who gave the 
order for the sounding of the bell, and in Macbeth it is Lady 

1 I. V. 



Massacre of St Bartholomew 119 

Macbeth who herself strikes the bell and herself gives the 
signal. 

Catherine was very impatient, fearing lest Charles, con- 
sidering the Heinousness of such deeds, should alter his mind... 
she was willing to begin without any further delay. . .she ordered 
the ringing of the bell of St Germain L'Auxerrois^. 

There can be no doubt of the terrible effectiveness on the 
stage of this incident — the striking on the bell — and, if the 
incident is so impressive to us, it would have been far more 
impressive to that audience at that time. One must re- 
member that Shakespeare would be likely to choose for 
representation on the stage not only those events which 
were dramatic and terrible in themselves; but that, as a 
popular dramatist, he would also have the strongest possible 
reasons for employing just those events which would affect 
his audience most. 

Motives like the witches, like the dagger, like the striking 
on the bell, were already symbols of horror. Why not use 
the symbols of horror? 

Another terribly effective detail is that of the attendants 
who are praying when the murderer — Macbeth — comes upon 
them. This also may have been suggested by Coligny's 
murder, for de Thou tells us that Coligny and his people 
were at prayers when the assassins reached the door. So 
we have Macbeth^: 

I stood and heard them: 
But they did say their prayers, and address'd them 
Again to sleep... 

One cried "God bless us ! " and "Amen " the other: 
As they had seen me with these hangman's hands. 
Listening their fear, I could not say "Amen," 
When they did say "God bless us ! " 

1 Laval, History of the Reformation in France. 

2 II. ii. 



120 Macbeth and the 

There is, of course, no such incident in Hohnshed. There 
are, it seems to me, further parallels in the murder of Banquo. 

In Holinshed the occasion for the murder of Banquo is 
a supper: 

He willed therefore the same Banquho with his son named 
Fleance, to come to a supper that he had prepared for them, 
which was indeed, as he had devised, present death at the 
hands of certain murderers, whom he hired to execute that 
deed, appointing them to meet with the same Banquho and 
his Sonne mthout the palace, as they returned to their lodgings, 
and there to slay them, so that he would not have his house 
slandered, but that in time to come he might clear himself. 

Now here again, as in the case of the Darnley murder, 
there is a natural parallel between the source and the his- 
torical event ; and here also, as in the case of the Darnley 
murder, Shakespeare has intensified that parallel by the 
details he has added. 

I need hardly remind the reader that the occasion for the 
massacre of St Bartholomew was the marriage-feast of Henry 
of Navarre with Marguerite of Valois and that the hideous 
treachery of making an invitation to a festival the occasion 
of a massacre was the common theme of all the Huguenot 
historians of France. No circumstance was dwelt upon with 
more anger and more horror by the Protestant world. 

We may compare what Nat Lee says in The Massacre of 
Paris : 

A reconcilement, with a wedding Feast, 
While murder was the Treat of ev'ry Guest. 

So in Macbeth everything is done to intensify the horror 
of this initial situation. Macbeth dwells, as strongly as 
possible, on the great honour he is paying to Banquo; 
Banquo was to have been the principal guest; everything 
was to have been done to honour him and all the time 
Banquo's destiny was the most grisly of murders at the 



Massacre of St Bartholomew ^121 

hands of his royal host. This is an almost exact parallel to 
the fate of Coligny who also was to have been the most 
honoured guest at a royal festival, who also was flattered 
to the full by his royal host and hostess and who also was 
murdered with the most grisly of murders. 

Coligny, when the murderers came upon him, besought 
his people with quiet dignity to escape and most of them 
did so, he himself facing the murderers with undismayed 
courage. So Banquo at once cries out to Fleance to flee. 
Here again the parallel to the history is far closer than it 
is to the source for Holinshed only says that, owing to the 
darkness of the night, Fleance escaped. He does not say 
that, with quiet dignity, Banquo had told him to go. 

Another parallel lies in the use of torches. The massacre 
of St Bartholomew was largely conducted by torch-light in 
the streets of Paris, and the murderers of Coligny carried 
torches. Jean de Serres states that torches were burning all 
night in the streets to make the task of the assassins easy. 
The murdered Huguenots saw a number of torches and then 
armed men approaching. 

So it is with the murder of Banquo. By the light of 
torches Banquo was slain^. Now of this detail again Holin- 
shed says nothing. Here also, just as in the striking of the 
bell, Shakespeare had an incident dramatic and dreadful in 
itself and also one that especially appealed to the nerves 
of his audience. 

Neither does Holinshed give any details as to the actual 
murder of Banquo. He only says that he was slain. 

The murder of Coligny was, in all its details, par- 
ticularly horrible ; he was struck repeatedly upon the head, 
covered with blood and terribly disfigured. This is exactly 
what happens in the case of Banquo whose hideous dis- 

1 III. iii. 



122 Macbeth and the 

figurement so haunts Macbeth. I will place the passages 

side by side. De Thou says, 

Besme gave him (i.e. Coligny) a blow of the sword in his 
body and then another in the mouth which disfigured his face 
very greatly. He was not satisfied with that but heaped upon 
him blow after blow. Coligny's corpse, all disfigured with blood, 
was thrown through the window and, so great was his mutila- 
tion, that Guise who was waiting to see the last of his enemy, 
could not even recognise him until he had wiped the blood 
from his face with his handkerchief. The body was dragged 
through the gutters of the streets and thrown into the Seine. 

De Thou further tells us that, after the body had been 
dragged about in "les ruisseaux de la ville de Paris," by a 
band of inhuman boys, the head was carried to the Louvre 
where Catherine and Charles feasted their eyes upon the 
spectacle. 

We may compare Macbeth'^ and the way in which the whole 

scene is made to reek with Banquo's blood and with the 

ignominies offered to his dead body : 

Mac. There 's blood upon thy face. 
MuR. 'Tis Banquo's then. 

Mac. But Banquo 's safe? 

MuR. Ay, my good lord: safe in a ditch he bides, 

With twenty trenched gashes on his head; 

The least a death to nature. 

Banquo, then, was murdered like Coligny with repeated 
blows upon the head and a terrible amount of blood, and it 
is exactly in that guise that he haunts Macbeth : 

Mac Thou canst not say I did it: never shake 
Thy gory locks at me. 

* * * the time has been, 
That, when the brains were out, the man would die. 
And there an end; but now, they rise again. 
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns. 
And push us from our stools. 

^ III. iv. 



Massacre of St Bartholomew 123 

We may also observe that just as Coligny's body was 
dragged along gutters and thrown into the Seine so a similar 
ignominy was offered to Banquo's body which was flung 
into a ditch. 

No such details are given by Holinshed. 

We may also compare the curious and dreadful interest 
Charles IX took in the faces of the dying: de Thou tells 
us that he went to look upon Briquemaut and Cavagnes when 
they were executed: "and caused candles to be put all over 
the Gibbet that he might see what mouths and faces they 
made in dying." 

Ever afterwards he was haunted by the faces of his victims. 

So in Macbeth: 

Avaunt ! and quit my sight ! Let the earth hide thee ! . . . 
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes 
Which thou dost glare with ! 

After the massacre of St Bartholomew Charles IX suffered 
from a really terrible remorse. 

De Thou tells us that Charles, who at no time slept well, 
used to have his night's rest broken by the memory of the 
dreadful scenes of the massacre, so that he seemed to die 
largely of remorse. The Huguenots regarded it as strange, 
if not miraculous, that the king who had deluged his realm 
in blood should perish of a malady which caused blood to 
exude from every pore of his body. 

It was certainly singular enough to excite the attention 
of the world. 

Charles IX, we are told, continually cried out to those 
around him, even while he was in his sleep, his horror of 
blood. 

Laval says of Charles IX : 

He suffered the most exquisite pains and was seen almost 
swimming in his own blood which came out of the body through 
all the usual passages and through the pores ; but who could ex- 



124 Macbeth and the 

press the remorse and tortures of his soul : ' 'Ah, Nurse, ' ' he said, the 

day before his death. " How much blood ! How many murders ! 

O my God forgive me, and vouchsafe to be merciful to me." 

Macbeth also suffers from terrible dreams^: he speaks of: 

the affliction of these terrible dreams. 
That shake us nightly; better be with the dead, 
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace, 

* * * Duncan is in his grave; 
After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well. 

So we have Lady Macbeth in her sleep, like Charles IX, 

crying out with horror at the blood and finding it exuding 

from the pores of her hands : 

" Here's the smell of the blood still : all the perfumes of Arabia 
will not sweeten this little hand." 

"How she rubs her hands. It is an accustomed action with 
her to seem thus washing her hands ; I have known her to con- 
tinue in this a quarter-of-an-hour^." 

De Thou narrates how the corpses of the Huguenots were 
dragged along in the mud and the number of the murders 
was so great that the blood filled the gutters and flowed into 
the rivers, staining them crimson. 

Such a circumstance naturally struck horror to the hearts 
of the Protestants and, in the Huguenot Memoirs already 
alluded to, many of the Huguenot poets refer to it^: 
Atro fluentem sanguine Sequanum 
Expavit horrens Oceanus pater. 

Hi ^ 4i Hi Hi 

Garumna caesos et Liger haud potes 
Referre * * * 

At vos scelesti, perfida pectora, 
Stricto profusis ense cruoribus, 
Terras e,t undas aeremque 
Tingite, mulciberisque flammas. 

Vindex, Olympo scilicet arbiter 
Mortalium es. 

1 III. ii. '^ V. i. 3 Published by Heinrich Wolf, 1576. 



Massacre of St Bartholomew 125 

This idea of the Seine, the Loire and the Garonne bearing 
the blood down to the ocean, of Father Ocean himself 
shuddering with horror at the blood and of this blood 
staining alike the waves and the earth, that and the im- 
possibility of the criminals escaping justice surely reminds 
us of the great lines in Macbeth : 

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather 
The multitudinous seas incarnadine. 
Making the green one red^. 

This idea does not occur in one poem only, but repeatedly, 
and it is easy to see how it might have kindled the terrible 
imagination of Shakespeare. 

We must remember that Shakespeare would have had at 
least three important reasons for using such circumstances 
in his poetry: (a) they were intensely dramatic in them- 
selves, (h) because of their associations they appealed par- 
ticularly to the nerves of his audience, [c] the men of his 
time regarded them with religious horror. 

D'Aubigne quotes Henry IV as his authority for saying 
that Charles IX after the massacre was troubled with all 
kinds of hallucinations; he was often distressed by visions 
and heard voices in the air : 

he (i.e. Henry IV) had been an eye-witness of the fact and he 
never related - it without shuddering. The Massacre was a 
lasting torment to the king to his very last breath... his looks 
and countenance were quite altered, and he grew much more 
sour than before, his mother and bloody councillors became to 
him objects of the utmost hatred; what added to his sorrow 
was that he saw himself deceived in his expectation for he had 
been made to believe that the destruction of the Admiral... 
would be the end of all divisions... the Medals struck repre- 
sented him as having conquered the Hydra... but a hundred 
heads sprang from the one he had severed. 

^ II. ii. 



126 Macbeth and the 

Now here again we surely have remarkable parallels to 
Macbeth. 

There are the hallucinations and the voices in the air. 
So do hallucinations play a prominent part in the mental 
history of Macbeth, the hallucination of the dagger floating 
before him, now unstained and now stained with blood, the 
hallucination of Banquo's ghost which nobody else sees but 
which to his eyes appears, disappears and re-appears. 

There is also the terrible voice in the air which cries after 
the murder of Duncan: 

" Sleep no more ! 
Macbeth does murder sleep,"... 
Still it cried "Sleep no more ! " to all the house: 
" Glamis hath murder 'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor 
Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no moreli" 

It will be observed that the voice in the air pronounced 
exactly the same doom of sleeplessness which did come upon 
the unhappy Charles IX. It was largely through want of 
sleep that Charles died; the doom threatened to Macbeth 
was Charles' doom. 

Now all these circumstances are added by Shakespeare; 
there is not the slightest foundation for them in Holinshed. 
HoUnshed has nothing to say either of the hallucination of 
the dagger or of the hallucination of Banquo's ghost or of 
the voices in the air or of the cause which deprived Macbeth 
of sleep. All these things are to be found in the history of 
St Bartholomew. The Macbeth of Holinshed has no blood- 
spots upon his hand, sees no visions of a blood-stained sea, 
does not suffer from dreams or sleeplessness or voices or 
visions. 

Does it not look as if Shakespeare had copied the terrible 
remorse of his Macbeth from that of Charles IX? Why 

* II. ii. 



Massacre of St Bartholomew 127 

should he not? His generation inherited the traditions of 
the rehgious drama; his generation beheved that God still 
executed His moral judgments in the world, and they be- 
lieved that these things were His moral judgments. 

Very similar also is the sohtude of Macbeth and the way 
he avoids even his wife: 

How now, my lord ! why do you keep alone, 

Of sorriest fancies your companions making. 

Using those thoughts, which should indeed have died 

With them they think on ? Things \\-ithout all remedy 

Should be without regard: what's done, is done^. 

And Macbeth's reph' curiously suggests the image of the 
hydra quoted above, the hydra the king had injured but 
could not sla}*: 

We have scotch'd the snake, not kill'd it; 

She'll close, and be herself, whilst our poor malice 

Remains in danger of her former tooth. 

Another curious detail may be quoted concerning the 
remorse of Charles. We have D'Aubigne's authority for 
this: 

Eight days after the massacre there came a great army of 
crows, some croaking and others perching on the great pavihon 
of the Louvre. The noise they made drew everj-body to see 
what was the matter and the ladies were frightened and ex- 
pressed their alarms to the king. That same night two hours 
after he was in bed, starting from his sleep, the king leaped 
out of bed, caused all the gentlemen to do the same and sent 
for Henry of Xavarre, complaining that he heard a dreadful 
noise in the air, as it were of many voices crying, and sighing 
and wailing and howling; and amongst them some furiously 

threatening and blaspheming The king sent his guards to 

stop the slaughter... the}' found all quiet in the city, only the 
skies in terrible agitation whereupon the king was more troubled 
than before. 

^ III. ii. 



128 Macbeth and the 

Now here again in the curious incident of the birds we 
surely have a Ukeness. There is the ominous raven who 
croaks at the entrance of Duncan: 

The raven himself is hoarse 
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan 
Under my battlements i. 

Also Macbeth is convinced that birds betray secrets and 

has a curious horror and fear lest they should betray his : 

It will have blood ; they say, blood will have blood : 

Augurs, and understood relations, have 

By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks brought forth 

The secret'st man of blood ^. 

So also the lamentations in the air have their parallel in 

Macbeth : 

The night has been unruly: where we lay, 

Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say, 

Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death; 

And prophesying, with accents terrible. 

Of dire combustion and confus'd events, 

New hatch'd to the woeful time: the obscure bird 

Clamour'd the livelong night^. 

We have here a very close resemblance to D'Aubigne's 
narrative of the birds of ill-omen and the voices heard in 
the air, and there is no parallel passage in Holinshed. 

In the Huguenot Memoirs I have already quoted ^ there 
is an epitaph on Coligny signed T.F.R. and called "Corvi 
ad Pseudogallos " ; it runs: 

Hie ubi Parrisiis Falconia furca minatur 
Excidium, insontis pondere pressa viri, 
Supplicium rauco crocitamus gutture corvi, 
Parcentes rostro cor ferire senis, 
Exanimi senis. 

^ I. V. 2 III iv 3 jj iij 

* Memoires de I'estat de France sous Charles IX. 



Massacre of St Bartholomew 129 

and the poem proceeds to show how the Parisians them- 
selves are blacker and less admirable than these crows who 
know the truth and are reverential to the body of the dead 
hero. 

De Thou and other contemporary historians tell us that 
France was deluged with vice and crime in the reign of 
Charles IX ; the whole land was rife with lewdness, luxury, 
irreligion, impiety and magic abominations; besides these 
disorders, treason, poisoning and assassinations became so 
common that it was looked upon almost as a joke to destroy 
by these means. We may compare this with the reign of 
Macbeth : 

Alas, poor country ! 
Almost afraid to know itself ! It cannot 
Be call'd our mother, but our grave: where nothing, 
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile ; 
Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rend the air, 
Are made, not mark'd; where violent sorrow seems 
A modern ecstasy: the dead man's knell 
Is there scarce ask'd for who ; and good men's lives 
Expire before the flowers in their caps, 
Dying or ere they sicken i. 

It is a terrible picture of a country where murderers reign, 
where law has disappeared and violence is rampant, and do 
not let us forget that it was probably what Shakespeare 
feared for his own country. 

There is also a strange parallel in French history to the 
prophetic figures Macbeth sees in the magic glass. Thus in 
his Deplorable Death of Henry IV, P. Mathieu tells us: 

The Marshall of Rais wife had been heard say that Queen 
Catherine being desirous to know what should become of her 
children and who should succeed them, the party which under- 
took to assure her, let her see a glass, representing a hall, in 
which either of them made so many turns, as he should reign 

1 IV. iii. 

w. M. 9 



130 Macbeth and the 

years, that King Henry III making his, the Duke of Guise 
crossed him Uke a flash of Ughtning, after which the Prince of 
Navarre presented himself and made twenty-two turns and 
then vanished. 

Now there is nothing whatever in HoHnshed to suggest 
the show of kings in Macbeth. HoHnshed says that Macbeth 
went to certain wizards and received prophecies from them, 
but he does not describe any vision; the prophecies given 
to Macbeth are the reassuring ones — Birnam Wood and the 
rest — they do not take a visual form and he most certainly 
is not shown the line of his successors. 

It looks as if for this truly magnificent conception Shake- 
speare was again indebted to French history and, as I have 
already pointed out, I think this particular book of P. 
Mathieu's invaluable for the light it throws on Shakespeare. 

The whole idea of combining the story of the Damley 
murder with that of St Bartholomew may seem strange to 
modem readers, but it had already been done in the Huguenot 
Memoir es so often quoted, where the Darnley murder, as told 
by Buchanan, is inserted into the very midst of the affairs 
of France. Shakespeare, like the contemporary Huguenots, 
considers as practically one tragedy the terrible crimes by 
which the Catholics sought to prevent the Protestant suc- 
cession in England, and in France ; he sees the similarity in 
their dabbling in witchcraft, the prophecies which terrified 
them and the prophecies which were, in each case, fulfilled. 

Do not let us forget that plots against the Protestant 
kings were still proceeding in England and France, and that 
the lives of both Henry IV and James I were held as in- 
secure. 

The Catholic conspiracy against the Protestant succession 
is the leading motive in Macbeth. 

Shakespeare's chief sources for French history were in all 



Massacre of St Bartholomew 131 

probability oral tradition.' If, as seems now established, he 
lived for several years in the house of the Huguenot printer, 
Vautrollier,vhe would have had every opportunity of meeting 
French Huguenots and of learning at first hand concerning 
events in France. The Memoir es I have quoted (published by 
Heinrich Wolf, Meidelbourg, 1576) are probably a source for 
King Lear and possibly, though more doubtfully, iov Macbeth. 

The Inventoire General de VHistoire de France, by J. de 
Serres, appeared in 1597 and might have been used by 
Shakespeare. P. V. de Cayet published an account of France 
in 1605 and portions of de Thou's celebrated narrative also 
appeared early. 

Henry IV's gentlemen did often visit England and it is 
surely possible that writers like P. Mathieu might come 
into personal contact with Shakespeare and hear the ex- 
planations of his plays from his own lips? 



9— -2 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE PORTER SCENE— CONCLUSIONS 

We have nearly reached the end of our exposition of 
Macbeth and there remain only a few loose threads to be 
gathered up. 

It has been very generally recognised that the brief scene 
of the Porter contains, at any rate, one allusion to Gun- 
powder Plot, and this, as I have pointed out before, is a 
means by which the play is dated. 

It is the allusion : 

Faith, here 's an equivocator, that could swear in both the 
scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for 
God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, 
equivocator^. 

This is plainly an allusion to the trial of Father Garnet 
to which we find many references in the State Papers of 
1605. Thus on December 12th, 1605, there is a list of points 
to be noted in the book of equivocation, suspected to be 
written by Gerard the Jesuit. The title was altered by 
Garnet from A Treatise of Equivocation to A Treatise 
Against Lying and Fraudulent Dissimulation. 

There is a further reference on December 23rd, on the 
examination of a priest — Richard Andrews : 

he thinks the Pope may absolve subjects from allegiance to a 
heretic king; equivocation is lawful where the right of a ques- 
tioner is not acknowledged; condemns the Powder Plot as 
detestable and damnable... has heard of the Book of Equivo- 
cation but not seen it. 

1 II. iii. 



The Porter Scene — Conclusions 133 

Another reference occurs on April 28th, 1606: "Exposi- 
tion and defence of Equivocation by Henry Garnet," 

when asked if it were well to deny on his priesthood that he 
had written to Greenwell or had conference with Hall, knowing 
his denial to be false; replied that in his opinion, and that of 
all the schoolmen, equivocation may be confirmed by oath or 
sacrament without perjury if just necessity so require. 

Garnet's trial dragged on for months and he was finally 
executed on May 2nd. The State Papers record his extreme 
surprise on being told that he was to die, "he shifts, falters, 
and equivocates," but "will be hanged without equivoca- 
tion." 

.1 think it probable, although not certain, that the Porter's 
^^^eech contains other references to the Gunpowder Plot 
trials of a somewhat gruesome and "macabre" description. 
Thus the Porter says: "Here's a farmer, that hanged 
himself on the expectation of plenty." "Farmer" was 
the pseudonym under which Garnet had for some time 
passed. 

Another phrase is: "If a man were porter of hell-gate, he 
should have old turning the key." One of the conspirators 
was named Robert Keyes^ and there were several of them 
racked, another was named Old. 

Another phrase is : " Knock, knock ; never at quiet ! What 
are you? — But this place is too cold for hell." 

Now, in the trial of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, 
the intense cold from which they suffered is repeatedly 
dwelt upon. It was very cold indeed in the vaults where 
Guy Fawkes was stationed as watchman. Also after their 
arrest the miserable wretches repeatedly protested against 
the extreme cold of their dungeons. Thus Silvester Morris — 

1 State Papers, Domestic Series, November 6th, 1605, February 
4th, 1606. 



134 The Porter Scene — Conclusions 

priest — writes to Salisbury (December ist, 1605) and "asks 
pity for his extreme sufferings from cold and darkness." 

Another phrase is: "I had thought to have let in some 
of all professions that go the primrose way to the ever- 
lasting bonfire." 

The Gunpowder Plot conspirators were, of course, exe- 
cuted as traitors ; they were dragged on hurdles to the places 
of execution, put to death by the gruesome and ghastly 
methods then in vogue and their remains were afterwards 
burnt in a bonfire ; it need hardly be remarked that this was 
simply to the popular mind a symbol of their fate in the 
next world. 

I can hardly think that so many gruesome and "macabre " 
resemblances have come by accident. It is, I think, more 
than probable that the Porter himself is meant as a satire 
on Guy Fawkes. Guy Fawkes served as the watchman who 
mounted guard over the cellar, he was found with a huge 
bunch of keys, it was as intensely cold as he describes it to 
be, and the Porter's references to himself are almost pre- 
cisely the language used of Guy Fawkes who is regularly 
termed "the devil," the "chief devil" and the "devil 
watchman." "If a man were porter of hell-gate" and "I'll 
devil-porter it no further." 

I cannot help suspecting that what we think of as the 
intrusions of comedy into Shakespeare's tragedies are not 
really comedy at all, but simply the tragic grotesque and, 
when one knows their full meaning, probably the most 
horrible parts of the play. I showed what I think good 
reasons for this conclusion with regard to the Grave-digger 
scene in Hamlet and I believe it to be equally true with 
regard to the Porter-scene in Macbeth. I strongly suspect 
that the Grave-digger and the Porter are made comic on 
exactly the same principle as Satan and Judas Iscariot were 



The Porter Scene — Conclusions 135 

made comic in the mystery-plays — because they could 
hardly have been tolerated in any other way ; they are the 
tragic grotesque as contrasted with the tragic sublime. 

The reader will observe that, just as in the case of Hamlet, 
I find that Macbeth himself is a composite character. 

He is certainly not like the Macbeth of Holinshed who is 
a totally different character, a strong and effective ruler 
who rules for many years in righteousness before he takes 
to evil courses. 

Shakespeare's Macbeth seems more interesting than any 
murderer could be in real life and it would appear that 
Shakespeare has taken from several characters their more 
interesting traits. Thus in courage and recklessness and 
terrible audacity Macbeth resembles the elder Bothwell; in 
his association with witches and evil spirits, in the dreadful 
glamour of unhallowed prophecy and unhallowed magic 
practices, Macbeth resembles the younger Bothwell; in his 
fearful hallucinations, in his anguish and remorse of con- 
science he resembles Charles IX. He thus becomes what we 
might term "the ideal murderer," a figure of superhuman 
horror and superhuman fascination. 

Had Shakespeare given us only the elder Bothwell there 
would have been produced a figure of terrific power and 
splendid recklessness, but wholly without the dreadful 
glamour of the supernatural and also a hard, callous man 
with scarcely any conscience and not deeply interesting 
because untouched by remorse. 

Had he given us only the younger Bothwell there would 
have been the glamour of the supernatural, but there would 
have been no consistent plan in crime and once again no 
remorse of conscience. Had he depicted purely Charles IX 
we should have had a creature singularly weak in character 



136 The Porter Scene — Conclusions 

and futile in act, tragic only by his dreadful capacity for 
moral suffering. 

Shakespeare puts all together and the result is one of the 
most tragically terrible figures in the world's literature. 
Macbeth commits appalling crimes and we are made to feel 
their full horror; but he always retains grandeur partly 
because of the dreadful courage with which he faces all 
things, seen and unseen, and conjures up those powers of 
evil who so terrify him, and partly because of his bitter 
remorse of conscience which makes him human to the 
end. 

And surely also Macbeth is the most terrible picture con- 
ceivable of an absolutely ruined soul? It is not merely that 
he has slain the man who should have been most sacred to 
him, that he has violated hallowing sleep and the holy 
silence of the night ; it is not merely that he has heaped sin 
on sin and crime on crime ; but he has also penetrated below 
and beyond the world itself, into dark reservoirs of unknown 
and unfathomable evil which the soul of man dare hardly 
dream of exploring and, most tragic of all, he knows that 
he is ruined and can measure all that his soul might have 
been and all that his soul has lost. 

Shakespeare certainly, I believe, found the whole of this 
in his own time; but I do not believe that he found the 
whole of such a terrible subUme in any one human heart. 
Hence arises, as many critics have pointe4 out, a certain 
difficulty in the portraiture for it is not easy to reconcile 
the hard and resolute side of Macbeth, his great qualities 
as a man of action, with the imaginative and neurotic terrors 
of his hallucinations. I cannot but believe that Shake- 
speare is creating something more than man: a figure in 
which all the elements are human but in which they are so 
combined that the result is superhuman. 



The Porter Scene — Conclusions 137 

As I have said before I find that all Shakespeare's greatest 
figures, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear and Prospero, have in them 
something which is more than human. We must remember 
that the miracle and mystery plays had dealt with beings 
greater than life, that Aristotle had taught that the tragic 
hero was greater than life, that Sir Philip Sidney^ believed 
that the poet should be greater than life for God had set 
man beyond and above nature, "which in nothing hee 
sheweth so much as in Poetrie; when, with the force of a 
divine breath, hee bringeth things forth far surpassing her 
doings." 

If Shakespeare deliberately aimed at surpassing nature 
he was, after all, only in accord with the tradition of his 
own age. 

^ Apologia for Poetrie. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE PROBLEM OF KING LEAR 

Let us turn now to a consideration of King Lear from the 
same point of view, asking what the play would mean to a 
Jacobean audience or to the king himself. 

Let us observe, in the first place, that it is a companion 
play to Macbeth, for it was produced about the same time, 
and that it was written directly for the Court. 

"King Lear," says Sir Sidney Lee, "was written during 1606 
and was produced before the Court at Whitehall on the night 
of December 26th of the same year. This fact is stated in the 
Stationers Company's License of November 26th, 1607. It was 
reprinted in 1608." 

Now Shakespeare's treatment of his source in King Lear 
is, as I have pointed out before^, quite as peculiar as in the 
case of Hamlet and far more peculiar than in the case of 
Macbeth. 

I showed that, in the case of Hamlet, Shakespeare had 
turned the Amleth saga completely inside out ; he had given 
the story a different ending, he had completely altered the 
main problem and the main character; he had added all 
kinds of new characters and new details and he had com- 
pletely altered the details he did retain. If it were not for 
the name Hamlet and the circumstance that the hero was 
a Prince of Denmark, we could hardly have guessed his 
literary source ; we should not even have recognised it had 
it been put in our hands. 

^ Introduction, also Hamlet and the Scottish Succession. 



The Problem of King Lear 139 

Now in the case of King Lear we have as strange a trans- 
formation. Let us remember, to begin with, that it was one 
of those stories with which the Elizabethan pubhc were 
most thoroughly familiar; it occurs first in Geoffrey of 
Monmouth's history, it is repeated in Shakespeare's favourite 
Holinshed, in The Mirror for Magistrates, in Spenser's Faerie 
Queene, etc., etc. In all these well-known versions the general 
outline is similar; King Lear asks his daughters for pro- 
testations of affection, is dissatisfied with Cordelia, shares 
her inheritance between her two sisters, is ill-treated by the 
two sisters and succoured by Cordelia whose husband — the 
King of France — comes to the rescue of Lear and restores 
him to his throne. King Lear reigns happily until his death 
and Cordelia succeeds him. 

Now there are three very important things to notice here. 

(i) That the story of King Lear was exceedingly well 
known: one of the most popular of all Elizabethan tales 
and that it was taken to be quite authentic and genuine 
history. 

(2) That in all the extant versions the story of King Lear 
was not a tragedy ; it ended happily because he himself was 
restored to the throne and reigned until his death. 

(3) That Cordelia triumphed over her sisters, restored her 
father and herself succeeded. Her story did end in tragedy 
for she was dethroned and murdered by the wicked sons of 
her evil sisters; but, so far as her relations to her father 
were concerned, she was entirely successful. 

Now surely Shakespeare has made here the most re- 
markable changes? 

(i) He has completely altered the ending of the story and 
turned it into a tragedy. This is astonishing because the 
story was already so well known ; it is the more astonishing 
because the storey was regarded as authentic history. 



140 The Problem of King Lear 

(2) The King of France plays, as we should expect, a 
very important part in the original story; in Shakespeare's 
drama he is simply mentioned as the husband who accepts 
Cordelia in spite of her disinheritance and then passes out 
of the tale, never to be mentioned again. His wife is 
imprisoned and put to death; but he never appears, 
nobody is afraid of his vengeance, nobody even refers to 
him. 

(3) Shakespeare completely alters Cordelia's story for she 
does not restore her father and does not succeed her father ; 
she falls a victim. 

Of course the change in the ending of the story has not 
escaped the observation of our modern critics; they have 
explained it, more or less as follows: that Shakespeare, 
having made Lear suffer such incredible anguish, could not, 
as it were in any common decency, restore him to his crown ; 
that would be an anti-climax. 

I most fully admit that it would. All the same I think 
they omit the main problem which may be stated thus: 
If Shakespeare intended to write one of the most terrific 
of the world's tragedies, as King Lear certainly is, why 
did he choose as his subject a remote king in the bronze 
age whose story was, in the original, not a tragedy at 
all but rather a conspicuous example of undeserved good 
luck? 

And the more we examine into the matter the stranger 
it becomes. In the original version by Geoffrey of Monmouth, 
Lear and his daughters are all of them more intelligible than 
in Shakespeare's play and so they are in Holinshed. Thus, 
Geoffrey of Monmouth does not state that Lear gave away 
the whole of his kingdom ; he reserved a certain portion for 
himself and, it was in order to gain this portion, that Goneril 
and Regan made war upon him. Thus Lear and his daughters 



The Problem of King Lear 141 

were all of them more rational; Lear was not so utterly 
unwise as to strip himself of everything, and Goneril and 
Regan were not motiveless in their malignancy ; they made 
war upon him for the eminently practical reason of gaining 
for themselves the remainder of the kingdom. 

The same thing is true of Holinshed in whom again the 
story is much more rational; Holinshed does not say that 
Lear stripped himself of all; he says that Lear kept his 
kingdom; but simply appointed his two elder daughters to 
be his successors, and it was not the daughters themselves, 
it was their husbands who made war upon Lear because he 
lived to be very old and they were tired of waiting for the 
inheritance. 

Coleridge, in discussing King Lear^ admitted that certain 
portions of the tale were improbable; but he pleaded that 
it was an old story, to which the audience were accustomed 
and therefore, being accustomed, would not note the im- 
probabilities which were, as our modem idiom would have 
put it, "given." This is certainly true of the love-test and of 
the anger against Cordelia; but the other improbabilities 
were not in the original story and were added by Shakespeare 
himself. In the original tale the daughters have, at any rate, 
a motive and in Shakespeare's favourite Holinshed it is the 
husbands who start the injustice. But Shakespeare gives 
Lear's daughters no motive whatever ; instead he makes them 
hate him with an intensely vindictive hatred. Now why? A 
modern poet — Mr Gordon Bottomley — has felt the diffi- 
culty so acutely that he has written a drama in which he 
tells us how, at a previous period of his life, Lear had ill- 
treated the mother of Goneril. 

Well! Mr Gordon Bottomley certainly rationalises the 
story but one must observe that there is nothing whatever 
in the text to support him; Lear calls himself an "old, kind 



142 The Problem of King Lear 

father, whose frank heart gave you all" and everything in 
the text confirms him. 

A quite ordinary greed is, I repeat, the main motive in 
the historical sources; but the Lear of Shakespeare's story 
has given all, and the main motive of Shakespeare's drama is 
thus a marble-hearted, inexplicable, inexpressible ingratitude . 

And just as Shakespeare robs Lear's daughters of their 
only intelligible motive so he makes Lear himself much 
more unintelligible. The Lear of Geoffrey of Monmouth was, 
apart from the love-test, very reasonably prudent; he did 
retain a certain portion of his kingdom for himself. So also 
the Lear of Holinshed, Shakespeare's favourite source, was 
very reasonably prudent for he simply appointed his 
daughters to be his heirs after his death and a portion was 
given them as earnest 

betwixt whome (i.e. the Dukes who had married them) he 
willed and ordained that his land should be divided after his 
death, and the one half thereof immediately should be assigned 
to them in hand. 

Moreover, when the daughters ill-treat him, he very sensibly 
goes to France in search of help and obtains it. 

But Shakespeare's Lear is robbed of these reasonable 
motives; he strips himself of all, he retains nothing except 
the empty honour of his hundred knights ; when he is turned 
out by his daughters it never occurs to him, as it does at 
once to Holinshed's Lear, to go and ask help from a strong 
son-in-law who can be rewarded by Cordelia's inheritance. 
The Lear of Holinshed knew at once that he had that card 
(a successful one, as it proved) to play; but Shakespeare's 
Lear shows an utter rashness and an utter helplessness; he 
trusts himself, stripped of all, into the hands of these women 
who call him "father" and flatter him boundlessly; but 
who hate him with a deadly hate. 



The Problem of King Lear 143 

A tragic and incredible folly and a blind and overwhelming 
trust in the wicked are the main characteristics of the play 
and neither of them were anything like so strong in the 
original story. 

Moreover, Shakespeare increases the improbability with 
regard even to the rejection scene. The original Lear re- 
pudiated Cordelia but he did not repudiate also his most 
faithful servant; there is no "Kent" in Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth or in Holinshed; it is reserved for Shakespeare to 
double the improbability by making the faithful friend and 
servant and councillor cast out with the daughter. 

Shakespeare gives us one improbability heaped upon 
another. Why does he make the conduct of all the principal 
characters in the play so profoundly irrational, making 
it irrational even where, in his source, it was quite 
reasonable? 

Moreover, the same curious treatment of the material is 
manifest in other directions. Thus Shakespeare has not 
drawn his material only from the Geoffrey of Monmouth 
and Holinshed tale of Lear; the story of Gloucester and his 
sons was taken from an entirely different source in Sidney's 
Arcadia. As we have seen the story of Lear was accepted 
as quite genuine history by the Elizabethans. The Arcadia 
was a pastoral romance. Surely Shakespeare is once again 
acting in a very extraordinary manner! Why should he 
take this tale which is regarded as authentic history and 
put into its midst a tale, also very well known, from a 
work of fiction. Suppose, for instance, that in writing 
Strafford Browning introduced the character of Waverley, 
whom everybody knows to be not a historical character at 
all, but a hero of Sir Walter Scott's. Would it not seem 
needlessly strange? 

It is the same problem as the story of Duff and Donwald 



144 The Problem of King Lear 

inserted into the middle of Macbeth, only in more acute 
form, for here the inserted material is not chronicle history 
at all. 

Moreover the new material has one characteristic in which 
it resembles the old for Shakespeare has altered the ending. 
In the story of Gloucester and his sons as told by Sidney 
(it is in the Arcadia the story of the blind king of Paphla- 
gonia) the blind king himself succumbs to his grief and dies ; 
the two brothers become reconciled and the wicked one 
repents. Shakespeare, on the contrary, has made Gloucester 
survive his injuries and come to a happy restoration; but 
he has not allowed the reconciliation between the brothers 
for the evil brother perishes by the forces he has himself 
set in motion. 

The story of Gloucester makes, as many critics have 
pointed out, a curious replica of the story of Lear; they are 
like the repetition of similar themes in music. Shakespeare 
often employs under-plots ; but he has nowhere else employed 
an under-plot which is so close a replica of the main plot. 

Mr Bradley, we may remember, compares King Lear to 
Beethoven's fifth symphony, and the "repeat" of a motive 
so grand and so tragic really does convey an almost musical 
effect. 

Sidney's Arcadia was sometimes believed to have been a 
political allegory. Now, so far as my work has gone, I have 
not been able to find any English interpretation, but there 
is what looks like a French interpretation of the story of 
Gloucester and that, as I have said, occurs in Pierre Mathieu's 
Deplorable Death of Henry IV of France. 

I will deal with it more fully later but the sum and sub- 
stance comes to this: the blind father is France and the 
blindness is symbolic of the blind and rash acts of that 
country; of the two sons the younger illegitimate son so 



The Problem of King Lear 145 

treacherous towards his father is Henry of Guise ; the legiti- 
mate son treated with such harsh injustice and so nobly 
devoted is Henry of Navarre. 

Now here again we surely have some very remarkable 
facts? 

In the first place P. Mathieu's allegory is undoubtedly 
a life of Henry IV of France. In the second place a portion 
of it does undoubtedly bear the closest possible resemblance 
to the Gloucester part of King Lear. But, if Gloucester is 
to be interpreted as France, if Edmund is the Duke of Guise 
and if Edgar is Henry of Navarre, who then is Lear and 
who are his daughters? 

What, in short, is to be the interpretation of King Lear 
as a whole? 

It is this question which I intend to answer or to attempt 
to answer in the following pages. 

Here I will only point out that, if King Lear really is a 
political play, in which the nations themselves are pro- 
tagonists and in which ungrateful children mean the factions 
of a civil war, tearing their fatherland to pieces^, then we 
can understand both the supreme greatness of King Lear 
as a play and also the alterations which Shakespeare makes 
in the original; for he certainly could not here (just as he 
could not in the case of Hamlet) find any previous material 
that would fit his political ideas in all their details. 

Also we understand the terrible depth of the tragedy in 
King Lear and the passion which the subject itself .excites 
in Shakespeare and which is so different from the languid 
antiquarian interest of most of his contemporaries. 

^ This metaphor is exceedingly common in the French historians. 
See also D'Aubigne's Les Tragiques. 



W. M. 10 



u- 



CHAPTER X 

KING LEAR AND THE DARNLEY MURDER 

King Lea r may be regarded as almost a companion piece 
to Macbeth. As we have seen the general estimate of its 
date is that it was written some time in 1606 and produced 
before the Court at Whitehall. 

Now I have shown already what the "complex" was in 
the minds of Shakespeare's audience at that date. The 
Gunpowder Plot was the great event of contemporary 
history ; it had terrified the nation to a degree very difficult 
to realise to-day. It was compared by the king himself to 
his father's murder and by the populace to the massacre of 
St Bartholomew; it was supposed to be the work of the 
same Catholic League which had planned both the previous 
crimes and which had produced or which had, at any rate, 
been a main agent in producing the Civil War in France. 
French Catholics blamed the French Protestants for the 
division of their kingdom and the Civil Wars. It was equally 
inevitable that the English Protestants should blame the 
Guises and the Catholic League. 

King Lear was written at a time when this same " complex " 
of emotions was dominant in the mind of the king and in 
the minds of his audience; it would therefore be perfectly 
natural that King Lear should appeal to this "complex" 
of emotions and I am convinced that it does. 

In studying Buchanan's Detection of the Doings of Mary, 
Queen of Scots and the appended Oration for the purpose of 
their relations to Hamlet, I became convinced that they were 
also sources for a large part of King Lear, and that many 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 147 

of the incidents and circumstances in that play which had 

no relation to the original story were to be found in the 

story of Darnley. A further examination of contemporary 

documents only confirmed me strongly in this idea. 

The parallels with the Darnley murder can, I think, be 

grouped mainly under the following heads : 

(i) Darnley was supposed by contemporaries to have been 
led to his doom mainly by false professions of affection and by 
his own excessive credulity. It was the special heinousness of 
Mary's crime against him in the eyes of Buchanan and the 
author of the Oration that she employed professions of her own 
affection to ensnare him to his doom. 

(2) Darnley was very rash and credulous in deserting all his 
own friends and placing himself entirely in the power of those 
who were false to him. 

(3) Darnley's murder is repeatedly termed a "parricide" by 
Buchanan and others because a husband stood in the same 
relation to his wife as a father to a child. 

(4) A great conflict had proceeded between Mary and Darnley 
over the title of "king." He wished to have the full rights of 
the crown matrimonial and complained that his authority was 
only a shadow. Mary's determination to exclude him from 
power brought the tragedy to a climax. 

(5) Darnley's great faults were pride and haughtiness and a 
tendency to break into furious rages. 

(6) Darnley was accused of egregious folly by his enemies and 
many contemporaries record that his opponents termed him 
"The Fool" and "The Boy," but especially the fool. 

(7) Buchanan and the Oration accuse Mary of taking away 
the king's servants, of forbidding her own servants to obey 
the king, of commanding the ambassadors not to speak with 
him, of denying him money even for the necessities of life and 
of making him a beggar and an outlaw. 

(8) Buchanan and the Oration accuse Mary of denying the 
king house-room and of thrusting him naked out of doors into 
desert-places and on heaths. 

(9) Buchanan and the Oration accuse Mary of compelling the 
king to take refuge in a ruinous house, tumble-down and ill- 
furnished, and to consort only with beggars. 

10 — 2 



148 King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

(10) Darnley, having a strong suspicion of his impending 
fate, tried to escape to France but the attempt was frustrated. 

(11) Buchanan and the Oration declare that the king was 
repeatedly the subject of the most bitter humiliations, Mary 
taking a delight in insulting him for the sake of insults. 

(12) His body was found after his death in an open field, 
close by the body of his servant, both naked. There is a picture of 
this in the Plan of the Darnley Murder kept in the Record Office. 

(13) Bothwell himself had the unparalleled impudence to 
assert that the king was killed in a thunderstorm and that 
either he himself in his madness or the lightning had stripped 
his clothes from him. (Melville's Memoirs.) 

It will be obvious that these things, if substantiated (and 
I have already named the main sources), offer far closer 
parallels to Shakespeare's play than anything in the Geoffrey 
of Monmouth or Holinshed Chronicles. How many, we may 
enquire, of the above parallels are to be found in the old 
tale of Lear? 

(i) Of course is similar in both. The Lear of the Chronicle 
Histories is certainly lured on by false professions of affec- 
tion. Even here, however, Shakespeare's drama is far closer 
to the Darnley story for, as I have repeatedly pointed out, 
the original tale of Lear is not a tragedy at all, whereas the 
Darnley murder is one of the most terrible tragedies in the 
annals of Scotland. 

(2) Here also Shakespeare is closer to the Darnley story 
for the Lear of the Chronicles does not strip himself entirely ; 
he reserves some security. But it is one of the main points of 
Buchanan's narrative that the unhappy victim has complete 
confidence and abandons himself entirely. 

(3) There is no mention of any "parricide" in the original 
story of King Lear, and could not be as the old king is not 
killed, but regains his throne. The Darnley murder is termed 
a "parricide," and Shakespeare's King Lear is also a parri- 
cide and a very terrible one, too. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 149 

(4) There is no quarrel over the title of "king" in Shake- 
speare's sources; the real grievance there is the fact that 
Lear does possess actual power; he has retained a good 
portion of the kingdom himself. Darnley, however, was full 
of grief over his mere shadow of power and this is the case 
with Shakespeare's Lear. 

(5) No stress is laid in any of Shakespeare's sources on 
the excessive pride and haughtiness of Lear; he wishes to 
keep the insignia of his rank as he has a right to keep them, 
but that is all. 

Shakespeare's Lear, on the other hand, is like Darnley, 
excessively haughty. 

(6) The folly of Lear is sufficiently obvious in the old tale 
in the egregious circumstances of the love-test, but it is not 
otherwise dwelt upon. It was reserved for Shakespeare, by 
means of the biting image of the Fool, to keep Lear's folly 
continually in his mind. Here again he resembles the 
Darnley story, for that unhappy prince did most fully 
realise his folly and most deeply repent of it. 

(7) Nothing is said of the Lear of the Chronicles being 
reduced to absolute beggary or of the nobles being forbidden 
to speak to him. These things occur in Shakespeare's drama 
and in the Darnley story but in them only. 

(8) Nothing is said of the Lear of the Chronicles being 
thrust out into a "desert-place" or a solitude. Darnley, 
however, is thrust out into solitude, into desert-places and 
among the "craggy mountains" of Scotland, and Shake- 
speare's Lear is thrust out on a "heath." 

(9) Nothing is said in the Chronicles of Lear being com- 
pelled to inhabit a ruinous house and to consort with beggars. 
These things happen, however, to Darnley and they happen 
to Shakespeare's Lear. 

(10) The Lear of the Chronicles made his escape success- 



150 King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

fully to France. Darnley tried to escape to France but was 
foiled and Shakespeare's Lear is on his way to Dover when 
he also is cut off by his enemies. 

(11) Humiliating insults are offered both to the Lear of 
the Chronicles and to Shakespeare's Lear. The humiliations 
offered to Darnley, however, included calculated insults from 
menials and in this again Shakespeare's Lear resembles him 
for this episode does not occur in the Chronicles. 

(12) In no previous version is it said that Lear and his 
companion either stripped themselves naked or were stripped 
naked; but this certainly occurs as a detail in the Darnley 
murder, and it occurs in Shakespeare's play. In the Chroni- 
cles no mention whatever is made of any nakedness in a 
thunderstorm. 

I will now proceed to deal with the parallels at greater 
length. 

Flattery is used as a means to entrap Lear; Goneril and 
Regan flatter him grossly and coarsely and it is Lear's 
susceptibility to flattery which is the cause of his ruin. The 
same thing happened in the case of the unhappy Darnley. 
Thus we read in the Burghley State Papers, 1568, in an 
"Abstract of Matters Shewed to the Queen's Majesty's Com- 
missioners by the Scots" : 

She wrote to Bothwell from Glasco, how she flattered her 
said Husband, to obtain her Purpose. 

...Finally she wrote to Bothwell that according to her Com- 
mission, she would bring the man with her, praying him to 
work wisely... and specially to make good watch that the Bird 
escaped not out of the Cage. 

We may compare this with Lear's phrase which seems so 
bitterly ironic where it comes in the play^: 

We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage. 

^ V. iii. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 151 

Melville in his Memoirs also speaks of Darnley's suscepti- 
bility to flatter}^ as being one of the chief causes of his ruin : 

It was a great pity to see that good young prince casten off, 
who failed rather for lack of good counsel and experience, than 
of evil will. It appeared to be his destiny to like better of 
flatterers and evil company, than of plain speeches and good 
men. 

Again the complete confidence with which Darnley trusted 
himself into the hands of Mary startled and even shocked 
contemporaries. 

The Oration says: "She goeth to her husband, she kisseth 
him, she giveth him a ring for pledge c f her love," and again, 

How much greater tokens the queen showed of reconciled 
affection, so much the more cruelty did every man in his heart 
preconceive of all her intentions. 

Darnley's murder is repeatedly termed a parricide. Belle- 
forest, in the work already alluded to as having possibly 
given suggestions for Macbeth, Histoire de Marie Royne 
d'Escosse, 1572, refers to the crime as a "parricide." He 
speaks of the real offenders trying to cast the blame on 
others: "toutesfois ils pensent innocenter leur malice en 
saisant le proces a ceux qu'ils ont faits parricides." 

Adam Blackwood, in his version published in 1587, terms 
the murder a "parricide." 

The Oration repeatedly dwells on the awful wickedness of 
this deed because it is a double violation of the two most 
sacred things on earth, matrimony and royal majesty. 

Whosoever I do not say hurteth the king that is the true 
image of God upon earth, but slayeth him with strange and 
unwonted sort of cruelty... seemeth he not as much as in him 
lyeth, to have a desire to pull God out of heaven. 

Now in the original Chronicle tale of Lear we have nothing 
of this terrific solemnity, this sense of the greatest of all 



152 King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

human duties violated and all human sacraments broken; 

but surely this is just the sense that is predominant in 

Shakespeare's King Learl 

We may compare with the passage above Lear's own 

words ^ : 

O heavens. 
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway 
Allow obedience, if yourselves are old, 
Make it your cause ; send down, and take my part ! 

The metaphors used in the one case often closely suggest 
those in the other. Thus Crawford in his Declaration'^ said: 

He would never think that she who was his own proper flesh 
would do him hurt.... My opinion was she took him more like 
a prisoner than like a husband. He answered he thought little 
less himself save the confidence he had in her promise only. 
Yet he would put himself in her hands though she would cut 
his throat and besought God to be judge over them both. 

Now here we surely have remarkable similarities. There 
is the identity of flesh as when Lear says^ : 

Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand 
For lifting food to 't ? 

and again. 

Is it the fashion, that discarded fathers 
Should have thus little mercy on their flesh? 
Judicious punishment ! 'twas this flesh begot 
Those pelican daughters*. 

We observe also the fact that Darnley is taken prisoner 
by Mary much as Lear is taken prisoner by Goneril and 
Regan. 

The title of "king" was a matter of great significance in 
Darnley's history. 

^ II. iv. 2 Scottish State Papers. 

' III. iv. * See also Chap. xiv. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 153 

We might observe incidentally that the Goneril of Shake- 
speare's play is the wife of the Duke of Albany, and this was 
actually the title that Mary, Queen of Scots, would hold 
from her husband for Darnley had been created Duke of 
Albany as Holinshed records of the year 1563: "In the 
month of July the lord Darnley, earl of Ross, was made 
Duke of Albany/' 

In the first ardour of her affection Mary gave Darnley 
the title of King of Scotland, without consulting her Parlia- 
ment, a circumstance which greatly exasperated that body. 
Thus on July 28th, 1563, the day before the marriage, 
Darnley was proclaimed King by the Queen's command- 
ment at the market cross of Edinburgh. In the early days 
of the marriage his name " Henricus Rex " was placed before 
hers on royal seals to be affixed to proclamations and other 
documents ; but in 1565 both Buchanan and Holinshed note 
that the order of the names in writings and on the seal was 
altered while the use of Darnley's seal was entrusted to 
Rizzio who was terribly insolent to him. 

"The order of the names," says Holinshed "in writings and 
protests was altered (in 1565); the king's name had hitherto 
been placed before the Queen's, now it was altered and David 
the secretary had a stamp of the king's name which he affixed 
when he liked." 

Mary, in fact, gave the real authority and true supremacy in 
her counsels to Rizzio instead of to her husband and this fact 
was counted as a special outrage by all Darnley's defenders. 

We will compare later this prominent position assigned 
to Rizzio with the position assigned by Shakespeare to 
Oswald, the base steward of Goneril, a person who does not 
appear in the Chronicles, but who is introduced by Shake- 
speare as a domineering and contemptible menial given 
authority over the powerless king precisely as Darnley's 



154 ^i^S Lear and the Darnley Murder 

friends represent Rizzio as a domineering and contemptible 
fellow given full insolent authority over the powerless king 
of Scotland. And, just as in King Lear the intrusions of 
Oswald cause aggravated mischief between Lear and Goneril 
so did the intrusions of Rizzio cause aggravated mischief 
between the queen and Darnley. 

Darnley all the more eagerly reached after the reality of 
power and felt all the more bitterly discontented with its 
shadow. In 1566, Holinshed records, Murray's friends per- 
suaded Darnley to stay the Parliament and to summon 
Murray back on condition that : 

he (i.e. Darnley) be made and crowned king of Scotland abso- 
lutely, and the queen so to have less to do with the government 
afterwards, where through he agreed with them. 

Darnley not only desired the title of king and clung to the 
title, but he could not bear to be deposed from power; he 
was particularly proud and haughty and very violent in his 
anger so as to excite positive terror at times in those sur- 
rounding him. 

Additional passages bearing on these circumstances may 
be quoted. 

Thus Randolph writes to Leicester, July 31st, 1565: 

this Queen is now become a married wife, and her husband, 
the self -same day of his marriage, made a king.... 

His words to all men, against whom he conceiveth any dis- 
pleasure how unjust so ever to be, so proud and spiteful, that 
rather he seemeth a monarch of the world than he that not 
long since we have seen and known the Lord Darnley. 

We may compare this with the pride and anger shown 

by Lear and with the accusations brought against him by 

Regan and others^: 

O the blest gods ! So will you wish on me 
When the rash mood is on, 

1 II. iv. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 155 

and with his own claim of superb pride when Gloucester 
asks: 

Is 't not the king? 

and he answers^: 

Ay, every inch a king : 
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes. 

Darnley, as a matter of fact, never had more than the 
shadow of power and even that soon disappeared. 

On December 25th, 1565, Randolph writes to Cecil : "A 
while ago there was nothing but 'King' and 'Queen,' his 
majestic and hers, now the 'queen's husband' is most 
common." 

We may compare this with the anger of Lear at his sub- 
jection^: 

Lear. Who am I, sir? 

Osw. My lady's father. 

Lear . ' ' My lady's father ' ' ! my lord's knave : you whoreson dog ! 

Darnley thoroughly resented his position of subjection 
and devoted his best energies to protests. 

Randolph writes to Cecil, January i6th, 1566: 

I cannot tell what mislikings of late there hath been between 
her Grace and her husband ; he presses earnestly for the matri- 
monial crown, which she is loth hastily to grant, but willing 
to keep somewhat in store until she knows how well he is 
worthy to enjoy such a sovereignty. 

It was this attitude of tutelage, of being kept in subjection 
and put on his good behaviour which, from the beginning, 
infuriated the proud heart of Darnley. It is the shadow of 
power possessed by him which is so bitter to Lear and it 
is the attitude of tutelage adopted by his daughters which 
he so detests and abominates. 

^ IV. vi. " I. iv. 



156 King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

We may compare the Fool's speech to Lear^ : 

Thou art an O without a figure: I am better than thou art 
now; I am a fool, thou art nothing, 

and again when Lear asks : 

Who is it that can tell me who I am? 

and the Fool replies: "Lear's shadow." 

Lear raves: "by the marks of sovereignty, knowledge and 
reason, I should be false persuaded I had daughters," and 
the Fool responds: 

Which they will make an obedient father. 
At every step his weakness and impotence are driven 
home as in the dreadful speech of Regan^: 

I pray you, father, being weak, seem so. 

Another interesting letter is that of Randolph, March 6th, 
1566, when we hear both that Darnley is desiring the crown 
matrimonial and that he considers he has received intoler- 
able treatment at Mary's hands. 

Somewhat we are sure you have heard of divers discords and 
jars between this Queen and her husband, partly for that she 
hath refused him the crown matrimonial, partly for that he 
hath assured knowledge of such usage of herself, as altogether 
is intolerable to be borne. 

Darnley, of course, suspected Mary of the basest sen- 
suality and it is notable that this is one of the terrible charges 
brought by Lear against Goneril: 

The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to 't 
With a more riotous appetite. 
Down from the waist they are Centaurs, 
Though women all above: 
But to the girdle do the gods inherit, 
Beneath is all the fiends' ; 
* * * Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, 
to sweeten my imagination: there 's money for thee^. 

1 I. iv. 2 ji iv^ 3 See also Chap. xiv. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 157 

The atrocious language heaped on Mary by her wretched 
husband seems to have been quite equal to this. No such 
accusation is brought against the Goneril of the old story 
or even hinted at. 

The whole of this part of Darnley's story almost exactly 
resembles the main position in King Lear) it is that of a 
man who has the name indeed of king but who has hardly 
even the shadow of power, who feels his position acutely, 
who is continually but vainly endeavouring to assert him- 
self, who thinks himself dreadfully ill-treated by the very 
person who had previously lavished on him all possible pro- 
fessions of affection and who is not merely ill-treated, but 
incessantly insulted, a person, moreover, who is so exces- 
sively proud and haughty that his best friends continually 
deprecate his pride. 

Thus M. de Croc writes to the Archbishop of Glasgow, 
December 2nd, 1566: 

I do not expect, upon several accounts, any good under- 
standing between them, unless God effectually put to His hand. 
The first is, the King will never humble himself as he ought; 
the other is the Queen can't perceive any one nobleman speaking 
with the King, but presently she suspects some contrivance 
among them. 

We may compare this with Goneril' s incessant jealousy 
of Lear's gentlemen and her determination to get rid of 
them^. 

Adam Blackwood (writing 1587) makes Murray the villain 
of the piece and says that he especially warned Mary against 
Darnley's pride ; he told the queen : 

that he would overthrow himself if her Majesty held not the 
bridle, and that the crown which he demanded would be the 
ruin of them both if she agreed with him ; she did well to keep 
her sovereignty with herself. 

^ I. iii, iv. 



158 King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

...he blamed his (i.e. Darnley's) pride that he was so insolent 
as to aspire to have the title of King of Scots and abuse the 
Queen as if she were a slave ; that his insolencie was intolerable, 
not only in regard of her Majesty, but also of all the nobility; 
that it was necessary to bridle it. 

Darnley carried his insolence so far that he would some- 
times strike messengers. So on May 21st, 1566, Randolph 
writes to Leicester: 

he is grown so proud that to all honest men he is intolerable; 
and almost forgetful of his duty to her already.... What shall 
be judged of him that for bringing a message from the queen 
that was to his discontentment would with his dagger have slain 
the messenger. 

Now accusations of this kind are brought against Lear. 
Goneril says^: 

GoN. Did my father strike my gentleman for chiding of his fool? 

Osw. Ay, madam. 

GoN. By day and night he wrongs me: every hour 

He flashes into one gross crime or other 

That sets us all at odds. 



We may compare also Randolph to Cecil 



2. 



Darnley keeps his chamber... in words I hear he is stout, by 
some deeds also he has shown what his will is if his power 
were equal to his furious passions. With his dagger he would 
have struck the Justice Clerk that brought him word that the 
creation of his being duke was deferred for a time. 

This is very like Lear who certainly shows terrific passions 
and at the same time impotence ^ : 

I will have such revenges on you both. 
That all the world shall — I will do such things, — 
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be 
The terrors of the earth. 

Rage and impotence were indeed the leading character- 
^ I. iii. 2 Calendar of Scottish State Papers. ^ 11. i v. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 159 

istics of Darnley just as they are of Lear; nothing Hke this 
is found in the Hterary source. 

So also we may quote Randolph to Leicester, June 3rd : 

The hatred towards him (i.e. Darnley) and his house is 
marvellous great, his pride intolerable, his words not to be 
borne but where no man dare speak again. 

...The passions and furies I hear say he will sometimes be 
in, are strange to believe.... They find nothing but God will 
send him a short end. 

Here again we have the closest possible resemblances to 
Lear whose passions and furies are indeed things "strange to 
believe" and who does use "words not to be borne" as in 
his taunts to Goneril, "Degenerate bastard," "Detested 
kite^," and the rest. 

As for accusations of unruly behaviour Goneril brings 
them continually against Lear and his household^: 

Not only, sir, this your all-licens'd fool. 

But other of your insolent retinue 

Do hourly carp and quarrel... 

I would you would make use of your good wisdom, 

Whereof I know you are fraught; and put away 

These dispositions, which of late transform you 

From what you rightly are. 

The egregious folly of Darnley was, of course, one of the 
chief charges made against him by his enemies, and admitted 
reluctantly even by his friends. In the confession of the 
Laird of Ormistown concerning the murder we read that 

it was thought expedient and most profitable for the common- 
wealth, by the whole nobility and lords undersubscribed, that 
such a young fool and proud tyrant should not reign nor bear 
rule over them. 

So also we read in Melville's Memoirs : " I met her Majesty 
coming from Dunbar to Haddington... she lamented unto 

^ I. iV. 2 I jy 



i6o King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

me the king's folly, unthankfulness and misbehaviour." He 
did his best to persuade her to reconciliation, but "I could 
perceive nothing but a great grudge that she had in her 
heart." 

Shakespeare has introduced into his King Lear the enig- 
matic and wonderful figure of the fool concerning whom 
even modern critics have been found to say that he seems 
like a living embodiment of Lear's folly. He is termed 
sometimes "a fool" and sometimes "a boy," and he does 
seem to be like a symbol or a detached personality of that 
second self in Lear which had ruined Lear^. 

The figure of the fool appears to me a plain piece of 
symbolism and a very grim and terrible one, too. 

^ So in The Tempest it would appear that the figure of Ariel is a 
detached portion of the personality of Henry IV — a sort of outward 
sign of his swiftly-acting genius. See Appendix B. 



CHAPTER XI 

KING LEAR AND THE DARNLEY 
MURDER {cont.) 

Another important matter to notice is the way in which 
Lear is deprived of his servants, treated with studied inso- 
lence by the servants of his daughter and reduced to beggary. 

This again closely resembles the history of Darnley whose 
defenders made continual complaint of the way in which 
he was deprived of his attendants, of the studied insolence 
of Mary's servants, especially of Rizzio whose part is very 
closely akin to that played by Oswald, and also of the 
extremity of the poverty to which the unhappy Darnley 
was reduced. 

Thus in Crawford's deposition^ concerning the murder we 
read: "He (i.e. Darnley) had neither the wherewithal to 
sustain himself nor his servants." 

We read in the Spanish State Papers, January i8th, 1567 : 

The displeasure of the queen of Scotland with her husband 
is carried so far... that she shows him no affection. They tell 
me even that she has tried to take away some of his servitors, 
and for some time past finds him no money for his ordinary 
expenditure. 

In the Scottish State PaperSy April 5th, 1566, we find 
Randolph writing to Cecil: 

The King of all others is in the worst case, for the Queen 
has no trust in him nor the people... the Queen is determined 
the house of Lennox shall be as poor as ever it was. 

^ Goodall. 

W. M. II 



1 62 King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

David Chalmers in his Chronicle of the Kings of Scotland, 
pubUshed in 1572, says that at the baptism of the child 
(i.e. James) 

there was small regard had to the mounting of the King, 
whereby he wanting such things as became a king at such a 
solemn time, he is commanded not to come in presence of the 
ambassadors and the nobility were commanded not to obey 
him. 

The king, seeing himself despised, and his enemy 
Bothwell preferred to him, rode away to his father at 
Glasgow. 

Now we have a precisely similar situation in King Lear 
where the nobility are commanded not to obey the king, 
and his enemy — Oswald — is preferred before him. 

Goneril says to Oswald^: 

If you come slack of former services. 

You shall do well; the fault of it I'll answer, 

and again 2: 

And let his knights have colder looks among you; 
What grows of it, no matter ; advise your fellows so : 
I would breed from hence occasions, and I shall. 

We have also the conversation between Lear and the 
Knight: 

Lear. Why came not the slave back to me, when I called him? 

Knight. Sir, he answered me in the roundest manner, he 
would not. 

Lear. He would not ! 

Knight. My lord, I know not what the matter is; but, to 
my judgment, your highness is not entertained with that cere- 
monious affection as you were wont : there's a great abatement 
of kindness appears as well in the general dependants, as in 
the duke himself also and your daughter. 

^ I. iii. * I. iii. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 163 

The scorn and contempt heaped on Darnley were, in fact, 
commonplaces ; thus on October 15th, 1566, de Croc wrote 
from Jedburgh: 

there is not one person in all this kingdom, from the highest 
to the lowest, that regards him (i.e. Darnley) any further than 
is agreeable to the queen. 

This corresponds precisely with Lear who is so much of 
an outcast that he has no companion but the Fool ; if this 
means, as I think it does, that the unhappy titular king had 
only his own folly to befriend him, we can see the infinite 
pathos and bitterness of Shakespeare's irony. 

The most important parallels, however, are to be found 
in Buchanan's Detection and in the appended Oration, both 
books which were readily available as sources to Shake- 
speare, which would certainly be well known to James I 
since the author of the first was his own tutor, and which 
were well known to the general public. 

"You," says the Oration to Mary, "drove away his servants 
that should have defended his Ufe; you thrust him out, naked, 
alone, unarmed, among thieves to be. slain; when in all this 
miserable state of your husband, your adulterer dwelt in your 
palace... your poor husband was barred from all company of 
the nobility, his servants forbidden to come at him or sent 
away from him and thrust away into solitary desert for a 
laughing-stock . ' ' 

Now here we surely have the closest possible parallels to 
Lear? They hardly could be closer. We have Darnley 
thrust out, "naked, alone and unarmed." So is Lear thrust 
out alone; so is he unarmed; so is he naked in the storm 
for he tears off his clothes^. So are Lear's servants sent away 
in the dreadful competition in cruelty between the two 



III. IV. 

II- 



164 King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

sisters when they beat him down to fifty knights ; then to 
five and twenty and then to none at all^ : 

GoN. Hear me, my lord: 

What need you five and twenty, ten, or five, 
To follow in a house, where twice so many 
Have a command to tend you ? 

Reg. What need one? 

and Lear's bitter reply : 

Lear. O, reason not the need: our basest beggars 
Are in the poorest thing superfluous: 
Allow not nature more than nature needs, 
Man's life is cheap as beast's. 

So, again, is Lear cast out into a desert place, "a heath," 
and so does he feel bitterly that he is a "mocking- 
stock2." 

Lear. Arraign her first; 'tis Goneril. I here take my oath 
before this honourable assembly, she kicked the poor king her 
father. 

And again : 

The little dogs and all. 
Tray, Blanch, and Sweet-heart, see, they bark at me. 

We may compare also Crawford's deposition: 

He presumed not to come in her presence till he knew her 
mind, for the sharp things she spoke of him to his servant — 
Robert Cunningham.... 

I answered his lordship would the secrets of every creature's 
heart were written on their face. 

We may compare this with Cordelia's words to Goneril and 
Regan : 

I know what you are : 

«{■ t* 9|C 3|C 9JC ■!( 

Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides ^. 
1 II. iv. 2 ijj yj^ 3 I i 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 165 

Crawford's deposition continues: 

He said in reply to her, she was the cause of his sickness and 
"Ye asked me what I meant by the cruelties specified in my 
letters?... it proceeded of you only that will not accept my 
offers and repentance.... God knows how I am punished for 
making my god of you and for having no other thought but 
of you... necessity compelled me to keep it in my breast and 
brought me in such melancholy as ye see me in..." he had 
nothing to sustain himself or his servants as she knew as well 
as he. 

Here again we have the closest parallels to Lear, Lear 
also is reduced to sickness and to the deepest melancholy 
by his daughter's unkindness; he refuses to seek shelter 
from the storm, 

where the greater malady is fix'd, 
The lesser is scarce felt^. 

So did Lear long to be with his daughters and desire only 
their kindness, so was he punished for making his gods of 
them. 

Buchanan and the Ovation accuse Mary of cherishing her 
adulterer when she had thrust Darnley out of doors. 

The Detection says, 

As in making of her marriage, her lightness was very headlong 
and rash, so suddenly followed either inward repentance, or at 
least outward token of change of affection without any cause 
appearing. For where beforetime the king was not only neg- 
lected but also not honourably used, at length began open 
hatred to break out against him, specially in that winter when 
he went to Peebles with small train even too mean for the 
degree of a private man... as commanded away into a corner 
far from counsel and knowledge of public affairs. Neither is 
it necessary to put in writing these things, which, as they were 
then a spectacle noted of all men's eyes, so now as a fresh 
image they remain imprinted on all men's hearts. 

Here again we have the closest parallels; we have the 

^ HI. iv. 



1 66 King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

causeless change from the warmest professions of affection 
to the bitterest hate, a change on whose utter unreason 
Buchanan specially insists just as Shakespeare insists on it 
in the case of Lear; there is once more the dwelling on 
the small and mean train of servants unworthy of a king 
or even of a private man but such as Goneril and Regan 
thought good enough for Lear; there is the fact that 
Darnley, like Lear, is commanded away "into a corner." 
There is also the statement that these things were in 
themselves "a spectacle"; the very word suggests material 
for a drama. 
Buchanan proceeds : 

After that she was delivered of her child, though she court- 
eously entertained all others, yet as oft as word was brought 
her, that the king was come to see her, both she and her 
company so framed their speech and countenance, as if they 
seemed to fear nothing more than that the king should not 
perceive that they loathed him and that his coming and 
presence were displeasant to them all. On the other side 
Bothwell was all in all, he alone was governor of all her counsels 
and all her affairs. 

Here again is a situation which corresponds in the closest 
details. The attitude of Goneril and Regan to Lear might 
be summed up in Buchanan's words: "They seemed to fear 
nothing more than that the king should not perceive that 
they loathed him." The open and obvious insolence with 
which Goneril and her train treat Lear is exactly like the 
open and obvious insolence with which, according to 
Buchanan, Mary treated Darnley. 

As for Bothwell, the adulterer, being governor of all 
Mary's counsels and her affairs this again closely resembles 
the relation of Goneril to Edmund. Lear, in fact, is sub- 
ordinated both to Oswald and to Edmund, just as Darnley 
was subordinated to Rizzio and to Bothwell. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 167 

The old Chronicle story of Lear contains the parts 
neither of Oswald nor of Edmund. The general outline 
of the tale of Gloucester is derived, as is always acknow- 
ledged, from Sidney's Arcadia, but this contains, be it 
noted, no parallel whatever for the relations of Goneril and 
Edmund which are Shakespeare's addition and Shake- 
speare's alone. 

Buchanan narrates later how the king followed the queen 
to Aloe Castle : 

The king... folio wed after with all the haste that he possibly 
could... and there overtook her in purpose and hoping there to 
be in her company and to enjoy the loving fellowship of 
marriage... being scarcely suffered to tarry there a few hours, 
while his men and horses baited, he was enforced to get him 
away in haste again and pain of further peril. As for herself 
she pastimed there in more than princely or rather unprincely 
licentiousness.... 

There how coyly, yet how loftily and disdainfully she be- 
haveth to the king what needeth it to be rehearsed.... 

In the meantime (i.e. while she commits adultery with 
Bothwell) the king commanded out of sight, with injuries and 
miseries banished from her, kept himself close with a few 
servants at Sterling. For alas what else should he do? He 
could not creep into any piece of grace with the queen, nor could 
get so much as to maintain his daily necessary expenses to 
find his few servants and his horses : and finally with brawlings 
lightly rising from every small trifle and quarrels usually picked 
he was chased out of her presence. 

Yet his heart obstinately fixed in loving her, could not be 
restrained, but he must needs come back to Edinburgh of 
purpose with all kinds of serviceable humbleness to get some 
entry into her former favour, and to recover the kind society 
of marriage. Who once again with most dishonourable disdain 
excluded, once again returneth from whence he came, there as 
in solitary desert to bewail his woefull miseries. 

Once again we have the exact situation ; the parallels are, 
beyond comparison, closer than anything to be found in 



1 68 King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

Shakespeare's so-called literary sources. We have some- 
thing not found in any of the literary sources, i.e. the king's 
pursuit of Mary in affection and longing for her love. So 
does Lear ride in search of Regan. 

We have the fact that Darnley is hardly "suffered to 
tarry there a few hours" which exactly expresses what 
happens to Lear in the case of Regan, because he has been 
there only the briefest space when the quarrel arises and he 
is (in Buchanan's phrase) "enforced to get him away in 
haste again." There is also the "unprincely licentious- 
ness" which is certainly the characteristic of Goneril no 
less than of Mary. The lofty and disdainful behaviour is 
certainly exhibited to Lear by both Goneril and Regan 
and excites Lear's frenzied rage^: 

How now, daughter ! what makes that frontlet on ? Methinks 
you are too much of late i' the frown. 

And also with Regan ^r 

The king would speak with Cornwall; the dear father 
Would with his daughter speak, commands her service, 

Exactly similar again is the fact that Goneril gives herself 
up to her adultery with Edmund, that Lear is commanded 
"out of sight," that he remains with "only a few servants." 

Buchanan's words "with brawlings lightly rising from 
every small trifle and quarrels usually picked he was chased 
out of her presence" are an exact summary of Goneril's 
methods with her father^: 

GoN. Put on what weary negligence you please, 

You and your fellows; I 'Id have it come to question: 

And let his knights have colder looks among you ; 
What grows of it, no matter; advise your fellows so: 
I would breed from hence occasions, and I shall. 

^ I. iv. - u. iv. ^ I. iii. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 169 

Darnley's heart, we are told, was "obstinately fixed" in 

loving Mary, and Lear is terribly hard to disenchant with 

Goneril and harder still to disenchant with Regan^: 

'Tis not in thee 
To grudge my pleasures, to cut off my train; 
To bandy hasty words. 

All this is self-deception but Lear, like Darnley, will insist 
on trying to trust where no trust is possible; Lear, like 
Darnley, is excluded with "dishonourable disdain "and like 
Darnley is shut out "in solitary desert to bewail his woeful 
miseries." 

No parallels could be closer. 

We may quote another most striking passage from 
Buchanan : 

When the king heard thereof (i.e. of the queen's sickness) 
he posted in haste to Jedwith....So far was it from his lodging 
and things necessary were provided against his coming (which 
is wont to be done even for mean persons) that he found not 
any token towards him of a friendly mind. 

But this was a point of most barbarous inhumanity used 
against him, that the nobility and all the officers of the Court 
that were present were specially forbidden, not once to do him 
reverence at his coming, not to yield him their lodging nor to 
harbour him so much as one night. 

And whereas the Queen suspected that the Earl of Murray 
would show him courtesy, she practised with his wife to go 
home in haste and fain herself sick, and keep her bed, that at 
least by this colour, under pretence of her sickness, the king 
might be shut out of doors. 

Being thus denied all duties of civil kindness, the next day, 
with great grief of heart, he retired to his old solitary corner. 
In the meantime, while the king in that want of all things, 
and forsaken of all friends, scant with begging findeth room in 
a cottage, Bothwell...as it were in triumph over the king, was 
gloriously removed in sight of the people into the Queen's own 
lodging. 

1 11. iv. 



lyo King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

Here again we have the exact situation shown to us in 
King Lear and not shown in any of Shakespeare's Hterary 
sources. 

The main thing to observe is that Mary is not satisfied 
with excluding Darnley herself; she knows that the Earl of 
Murray would be likely to receive him so she practises with 
Murray's wife to have him shut out of doors. This is pre- 
cisely what happens to Lear; Goneril is not satisfied with 
excluding him herself; she takes care to "practise" with 
Regan so that Regan may also exclude him^. 

GoN. I know his heart. 

What he hath utter'd I have writ my sister: 
If she sustain him and his hundred knights, 
When I have show'd the unfitness, — 

:|c 4: 4c * !(: it: 

Inform her full of my particular fear; 
And thereto add such reasons of your own 
As may compact it more. 

Before Darnley arrives the nobility and officers of the 
Court had been specially forbidden to do him any reverence 
or to yield him any lodging or "to harbour him so much 
as one night." This is precisely what happens to Lear when 
he goes to Regan. All has been prepared in order that he 
may be rejected and turned away and not even a night's 
hospitality permitted. 

Buchanan, we have seen, employs the very phrase "shut 

out of doors " with regard to Darnley and this is quite literally 

what happens to Lear^: 

No, I will weep no more. — In such a night 
To shut me out ! 

so Gloucester says : 

Go in with me: my duty cannot suffer 

To obey in all your daughters' hard commands: 

1 I. iv. ^ III. iv. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 171 

Though their injunction be to bar my doors, 
And let this tyrannous night take hold upon you, 
Yet have I ventur'd to come seek you out. 
And bring you where both fire and food is ready. 

It is notable that Gloucester has received the most definite 
instructions not to succour Lear just like the instructions 
which Buchanan says that Mary gave to her nobles. Now 
nothing like this refusal of ordinary fire, lodging and shelter 
occurs in any of the sources; but it certainly occurs in 
King Lear and in the history. 

Buchanan says that Darnley "scant with begging findeth 
room in a cottage, " and it was in a hovel on the heath, in 
straw, that Lear ultimately found shelter. 

Buchanan continues: 

Her lawful husband, at the christening of his own child, 
not only wanted all maintenance for his necessary expenses, 
but also was commanded not once to come in the ambassador's 
sight, his ordinary servants were removed from him, the nobility 
were enjoined not once to attend on him, nor to do him honour, 
nor in a manner to know him; the foreign ambassadors were 
warned not to talk with him, when yet the most part of the 
day they were all in the same castle where he was. 

Once again we have exact parallels to Shakespeare's drama 
which also are not found in the literary sources. Mary was 
not satisfied with shutting out her husband and removing 
his servants, even the nobility and ambassadors are warned 
to have no conference with him. 

This, again, is precisely what happens to Lear. Goneril 
removes his servants, she prevents Regan from receiving 
him and she is still not satisfied but must command Glou- 
cester to have nothing to do with him^. 

Alack, alack, Edmund, I like not this unnatural dealing. When 
I desired their leave that I might pity him, they took from me 

1 in. ill. 



172 King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

the use of mine own house; charged me, on pain of their per- 
petual displeasure, neither to speak of him, entreat for him, 
nor any way sustain him. 

Gloucester continues : 

Go to; say you nothing. There's a division betwixt the dukes 
...these injuries the king now bears will be revenged home; 
there's part of a power already footed : we must inchne to the 
king. 

This again precisely represents the situation in Scotland 
where quarrels arose between the factious nobles and where 
there was always a party ready for their own sakes to support 
Darnley which was precisely what made Darnley formidable. 

Buchanan continues: 

The young gentleman thus contemptuously and unkindly 
used fell in such despair, that he departed from Sterling. At 
his departure the Queen still pursued him with her wonted 
hatred. All his silver plate wherewith he was served from his 
marriage until that day, she took it away every whit, and 
appointed pewter in the stead thereof. 

...the rest that followed are evident arguments of out- 
rageous cruelty and unappeasable hatred. 

I have called attention before to the fact that in King 
Lear the hatred Goneril and Regan feel for their father is 
causeless and inexplicable, they have no reason whatever 
for their persecution which, also, is unutterably mean; they 
will not allow him to have " ten servants, nor five, nor one." 

Buchanan proceeds: 

Bothwell provided all things ready that were needed to 
accomplish the heinous act, first of all a house not commodious 
for a rich man, nor comely for a king, for it was both torn and 
ruinous, and had stood empty without any dweller for diverse 
years before; in a place of small resort, between the old fallen 
walls of two kirks, near a few almshouses for poor beggars. 

Once again we have close parallels with King Lear. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 173 

It is in just such a place that Lear finds refuge; the house 
is "torn and ruinous" and standing empty; it also is in a 
place of small resort; Darnley's refuge is near a few alms- 
houses for poor beggars and Edgar comes to Lear's hovel 
disguised as a beggar. 

The author of the Oration follows exactly the same lines : 

If they demand the cause of so heinous a deed, I answer that 
it was unappeasable hatred. I demand of them again if they 
can deny that such hatred was, or that the same hatred was 
so great as without blood could not be satisfied. If they deny 
that such hatred was then let them answer me why she, a 
young woman, rich, noble and finally a queen, thrust away 
from her in manner into exile, the young gentleman... entirely 
loving her, in depth of sharp winter, into places neither fruitful 
of things necessary, nor replenished with inhabitants, and 
commonly perilous with haunt of thieves, why sent she him 
away into desert and barren craggy mountains, without pro- 
vision, into open perils and in manner without any company 

What else could she have done if she most deadly hated 
him.... 

Here again is a passage which gives us the central situa- 
tion of King Lear. 

There is the intense and violent and unprovoked hatred 
which Shakespeare, quite contrary to the old Chronicle tale, 
makes one of the main motives of his play. There is, once 
again, the "thrusting away into exile" of the man "entirely 
loving her." The inclemency of the weather is dwelt upon; 
the "depth of sharp winter" is as bad as Shakespeare's 
tempest which also, we may observe, was intensely cold. 

Darnley is thrust away into places not "replenished 
with inhabitants" and Lear's heath was certainly such a 
place. 

Darnley is thrust away into places "perilous with haunt 
of thieves" and Lear has no companion but the madman 
and beggar — Edgar. Darnley is thrust away "into desert 



174 K^^ ^^^^ ^^d the Darnley Murder 

and barren craggy mountains," "in manner without any 
company." So is Lear thrust out on his heath, so has he 
no company but the fool and the beggar madman. 

Could it be possible to give more accurately the central 
situation of Shakespeare's drama? And there is not a hint 
of it in the Chronicles. 

The Oration draws a contrast between Mary "rich, noble 
and finally a queen" and the abject poverty into which she 
excludes Darnley, and Lear draws a similar heart-rending 
contrast between Regan and his own exclusion^: 

thou art a lady; 
If only to go warm were gorgeous. 
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st. 
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. 

The Oration continues: 

Call to mind that part of her letters to Bothwell wherein she 
maketh herself Medea, that is a woman that neither in love 
nor in hatred can keep any mean... she hated and not meanly 
hated him. 

The Oration compares Mary to Medea and surely there 
is no figure in modem literature so like Medea as the dreadful 
figure of Goneril : the woman who betrays and ill-treats her 
father, who has no shame in her love, who poisons her sister 
and who also is betrayed with cold callousness by the object 
of her shameless passion. 

The Oration continues to speak of Darnley's exclusion 
after the birth of his child : 

What else shall one say she meant thereby, but as the poet 
sayth for pure love God wot she shut him out of doors. But 
this tender creature either shutteth out her husband, or as 
soon as he is come chaceth him away again, whose stomach 

^ n. iv. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 175 

turns at the sight of him and who is suddenly taken with pangs 
at his presence. 

Here again we have the ironic contrast, so marked in 
King L^«r, between the professions of love and the "shutting 
out of doors"; here we have the statement applied to 
Damley, "she chaceth him away again, " which is certainly 
exactly what happens to Lear with Regan. 

The Oration proceeds to enumerate all the occasions on 
which Darnley was turned away to make room for the 
adulterer and says: "I am content to believe she did it not 
for hatred to her husband but for fancy's sake," but 

That she gave special commandment that no man should 
lodge him, that no man should relieve him with meat or drink, 
that she in a manner forbade him the use of fire and water, 
this is undoubtedly token of outrageous hatred. 

It is always, we see, the same central situation. Darnley 
is repeatedly and cruelly excluded, shut out by the being 
on whom he has most claim ; so also is Lear repeatedly ex- 
cluded by a furious and causeless hate. As for the command : 
"that no man should relieve him with meat, or drink, that 
no man should lodge him," we have already seen that 
Gloucester had received exactly the same instructions with 
regard to Lear^. 

Kent implores Gloucester: 

Importune him once more to go, my lord; 
His wits begin to unsettle, 

and Gloucester answers : 

Canst thou blame him? 
His daughters seek his death. 

Just as Darnley's death was deliberately sought for, so 

^ III. iv. 



176 King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

we have Gloucester's word that Lear's death was dehber- 
ately sought for^: 

I have o'er-heard a plot of death upon him: 

If thou shouldst dally half an hour, his life. 
With thine, and all that offer to defend him, 
Stand in assured loss. 

The plot here is surely as grave as the plot against 
Darnley. As for the refusal of the "use of fire and water," 
we may compare what Cordelia says^: 

Mine enemy's dog. 
Though he had bit me, should have stood that night 
Against my fire. 

The Oration continues: 

That she sent him back from Craigmillar to SterUng I com- 
plain not. But that she bereaved him of all his necessaries, that 
she took from him his servants,... that she alienated the nobiUty 
from him... and (as much as in her lay) took from him even 
while he lived the use of heaven, earth and air; this, I say, I 
doubt what to call it, unnaturalness, hatred, barbarous fierce- 
ness or outrageous cruelty... the poor king lived in desolation, 
in sorrow and beggary. 

It is always the same situation which is the central situa- 
tion in King Lear, the taking away of the servants is the 
only part which resembles the old Chronicle story; all the 
rest of Shakespeare's play resembles the history only. We 
have the deliberate alienation of the nobility as Goneril 
attempts to alienate Gloucester; the taking away from him, 
even while he lived, of the "use of heaven, earth and air," 
which is startlingly applicable to Lear, banished to a heath 
and crowded into a wretched hovel with only musty straw 
to lie in. 

^ III. vi. 2 IV. vii. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 177 

Kent implores him to enter the hovel^: 

Repose you there; while I to this hard house 
(More harder than the stones whereof 'tis rais'd, 
Which even but now, demanding after you, 
Denied me to come in) return and force 
Their scanted courtesy, 

and Lear replies: 

Where is this straw, my fellow? 
The art of our necessities is strange. 
That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel. 

The intense coldness of the night on which Lear is shut 
out is dwelt upon exactly as Buchanan dwells on the coldness 
of the winter. Edgar cries ^r 

Through the sharp hawthorn blows the wind, 
Hum ! go to thy cold bed, and warm thee. 

The Oration continues: 

But how great and unappeasable this hatred was, even by 
this ye may gather. Her husband so oft shut out... driven to 
extreme poverty, banished into a desolate corner... far from 
presence of men, spoiled of his servants and furniture of house- 
hold,... yet by no injuries can be shaken from her, by no fear / 
of death can be withdrawn but. . .he assayeth, if not to overcome, \ 
at least to combat the violent cruelty of her unkind courage. 

It is always the same reiteration as in Lear; always the 
being shut out and driven into a desolate comer, always 
the motive of the servants being taken away, 

Regan^: 
She hath abated me of half my train; 
Look'd black upon me; struck me with her tongue. 
Most serpent-Uke, upon the very heart: 

1 III. ii. 2 in. iv. 3 II, iv. 

vv. M. 12 



lyS King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

and again: 

Return to her, and fifty men dismiss 'd? 
No, rather, I abjure all roofs, and choose 
To be a comrade with the wolf and owl, 

and again : 

GoN. What need you five and twenty, ten, or five, 

Reg. What need one? 

As for the absence of furniture we notice that one of 
Lear's refuges contains, apparently, only straw; the other 
seems to have nothing much beside joint-stools. Cordelia 
speaks of him as limited to "short and musty straw ^." 

The Oration proceeds: 

Neither is she once moved with the loving doings, nor with 
the wretched plight, nor with the miserable woefulness of her 
husband, nor appeased by time, nor satisfied by torments, but 
rather with his serviceableness she is irritated... at every time 
of his coming she deviseth some new increase of spiteful dis- 
honour... he was despised of all men and thrown into open 
perils. 

It is continually the same situation which is reiterated 
and it is the central situation in King Lear. It is said of 
Mary that, each time Darnley approaches her, she treats 
him with some "new increase of spiteful dishonour." Could 
there be a better description of the attitude Goneril and 
Regan take towards Lear? Their intense spitefulness com- 
bines with their insensate hatred to make them the most 
utterly loathsome women in Shakespeare. 

The Oration continues: 

By this time I suppose you see the hatred of the queen... how 
unappeasable, how outrageously cruel, how obstinate it was 
against her husband, whom she thrust among thieves... whom 

1 IV. vii. 



King Lear and the Darnley Murder 179 

naked and poor, loaden with despites, vexed with raiHngs, 
assailed with poison, she drove away into a sohtary corner 
there to die with extremest torment. 

Here we have again the metaphor of nakedness which is 
employed with such dreadful effect in King Lear^. 

Lear. Why, thou wert better in thy grave, than to answer 
with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. — Is man 
no more than this?... Thou art the thing itself :... Off, off, you 
lendings ! — Come, unbutton here. 

It is possible that Murray gave Shakespeare hints for the 
character of Kent : 

"Murray," says the Oratio7i, "was also hated by the queen, 
her hatred was ' the cause that so often brought him in danger 
of death... that made him rather choose to go into banishment 
than to remain in court among ruffians'." 

Murray was banished, we may observe, through Darnley's 
anger but returned privately and in concealment in the 
endeavour to help him to get the Crown matrimonial. So 
does Kent return from banishment to help Lear in the hope 
to deliver Lear and ultimately to return him to power 2. 

Another point of resemblance lies in the desire Darnley 
has "to go beyond sea." Lear, when he is turned away by 
Regan, takes flight for Dover and it is on his way there that 
he is re-captured. Now this also has a parallel in the history. 
De Croc wrote October 15th, 1566: 

The Queen is now returned from Stirling to Edinburgh. The 
King, however, abode at Stirling, and he told me there that 

he had a mind to go beyond sea in a sort of desperation 

The Bishop of Ross by the Queen's commandment declared to 
the Council the King's intention to go beyond sea, for which 
purpose he had a ship lying ready to sail.... Therefore the Queen 
prayed the King to declare in presence of the Lords and before 
me the reason of his projected departure.... I likewise took the 
1 III. iv. 2 jii j 

12 — 2 



i8o King Lear and the Darnley Murder 

freedom to tell him that his departure must certainly affect 
either his own or the Queen's honour.... The King... went out 
of the chamber of presence saying: "Adieu, Madam, you shall 
not see my face for a long space." 

On May 7th, 1566, Drury wrote to Cecil^: "The misliking 
between the Queen and her husband increases so that it is 
judged he cannot in safety dwell long in Scotland," and 
again on May 23rd: "It goes yet very hardly between the 
noblemen and the Queen of Scots, but specially with her 
husband who goes into Flanders." 

This again corresponds very closely with the situation in 
King Lear where Gloucester is certain that the death of 
Lear is determined and wishes to hurry him to Dover to get 
him out of the country or to meet Cordelia's force. He has 
to answer why he wished to convey the king to Dover and 
he answered truthfully because he did not wish to see Regan : 

In his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs^. 
1 State Papers, Foreign Series. 2 m vii. 



CHAPTER XII 

BOTHWELL AND EDMUND— 
RIZZIO AND OSWALD 

In the previous chapter I have several times alluded to 
what I believe to be a connection between the character of 
Bothwell and the story of Edmund. The story of Edmund's 
callous love-making to the two sisters conjointly, his de- 
ception of both and their furious jealousy of each other 
offers the closest resemblances to the Mary and Darnley 
story as shown in the Casket Letters and as told by Buchanan. 
We may remember, also, that this portion of King Lear is 
entirely Shakespeare's own introduction; he certainly did 
not find it in the story of Lear and neither did he find it in 
Sidney's Arcadia, for the tale of the blind king of Paphla- 
gonia contains no love-story — it concerns solely the relation 
of the father to the two sons. 

The Casket Letters which were certainly believed by the 
Protestants of the time to be genuine and which were, of 
course, available as a source for Shakespeare, show Mary's 
bitter resentment at being tied to Darnley and her anger 
and jealousy against Bothwell's wife. Letter I says: 

Cursed may this pockish man be, that causes me have so 
much pain, for without him I would have a far more pleasant 
subject to discourse upon. 

Letter II reads: 

You have never heard him speak better nor more humbly; 
and if I had not proof of his heart to be as waxe, and that 
mine were not as a diamond, no stroke but coming from your 
hand would make me but to have pity on him. But fear not 



1 82 Bothwell and Edmund — Rizzio and Oswald 

for the place shall continue till death. Remember also, in re- 
compense thereof, not to suffer yours to be won by that false 
race that would do no less to yourself. 

...He has always the tears in his eye. He saluteth every 
man, even to the meanest, and maketh much of them that 
they may take pity of him. 

...See not also her feigned tears; you ought not more to 
regard them than the true travails which I endure to deserve 
her place, for obtaining of which against my own nature, I 
do betray those that would let me. 

We may notice, incidentally, how closely this passage re- 
sembles Lear. When Mary says of Darnley that he salutes 
every man, even to the meanest, and makes much of them 
that they may pity him, we are surely reminded of Lear 
and his wretchedness when he seeks sympathy even from 
the beggar Edmund and the fool. 

In his anguish he expresses a deep compassion for the 
poorer 

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are. 
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm. 
How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides. 
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you 
From seasons such as these? 

The main situation, surely, is exactly like that of Goneril, 
resenting keenly her tie to Albany and furiously jealous of 
her sister Regan. 

Goneril speaks as contemptuously of Albany as Mary 
does of Darnley 2: 

It is the cowish terror of his spirit. 

That dares not undertake : he'll not feel wrongs 

Which tie him to an answer. 

Decline your head ; this kiss, if it durst speak. 
Would stretch thy spirits up into the air: 
Conceive, and fare thee well, 

^ III. iv. 2 IV. ii. 



Bothwell and Edmund — Rizzio and Oswald 183 

and again : 

O, the difference of man and man ! 
To thee a woman's services are due: 
My fool usurps my body. 

So soon afterwards, in exactly the same way as Mary 
scorns Darnley, does Goneril heap her contempt on Albany 
(who bears, be it remembered, the same historical title, for 
Darnley was actually Duke of Albany) . 

Similar also is Goneril's jealousy of her sister especially 

when Regan, after Cornwall's death, becomes available as a 

legal wife. 

I had rather lose the battle, than that sister 
Should loosen him and me^, 

and we have also Edmund's reflections on the situation ^i 

To both these sisters have I sworn my love; 
Each jealous of the other, as the stung 
Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take? 
Both? one? or neither? 

This exactly represents the situation as depicted in the 

Casket Letters and in Mary's appended sonnets. 

Even the love-letters of Regan ^: 

Therefore I do advise you, take this note: 
My lord is dead; Edmund and I have talk'd; 
And more convenient is he for my hand 
Than for your lady's : . . . 
If you do find him, pray you, give him this. 

Even these love-letters have their parallel in the curious 
sonnets Mary and Lady Bothwell wrote to Bothwell in 
rivalry : 

EUe pour son honneur vous doibt obeyssance, 
Moy vous obeyssant e'en puis recevoir blasme, 
N'estat, a mon regret, comme elle vostre femme. 
Et si n'aura pourtant en ce point pre-eminence 
Pour son propre profit. 

^ V. i. 2 y^ i^ 3 iy_ y_ 



184 Bothwell and Edmund — Rizzio and Oswald 

In Sonnet 6, an extraordinary production, Mary accuses 
her rival of borrowing her love-letters and love-poems 
from literary sources and declares that Lady Bothwell 
expresses her love for her husband in phrases which are 
not hers : 

Et toutesfois ses paroUes fardeez 

Ses pleurs, ses plaincts remplis de fLctions. 

Et ses hautz cris et lamentations 

Ont tant gaigne que par vous sont gardeez 

Ses lettres aux quellez vous donnez foy 

Et si I'aymez et croyez plus que moy. 

Sonnet 9 is an impassioned expression of the way in which 
for Bothwell's sake Mary has given up her honour, yielded 
up her greatness and conscience and left her relatives and 
friends : 

Pour luy depuis jay mesprise Fhonneur 
Ce qui nous peult seul pouvoir de bonheur. 
Pour luy hazarde grandeur et conscience. 
Pour luy... j 'ay quite parentz et amis, 
Et tous autres respect z sont apart mis. 

Here again we have an exact counterpart to the reckless- 
ness and dishonour of Goneril; it is equally true that she 
scorns her honour for the sake of Edmund, that she risks 
her greatness for his sake; it is for Edmund that Goneril 
has lost husband and friends and tramples on "all other 
respects." We may note as a further parallel that, when 
Goneril is finally ruined, it is by means of the love-letters 
that she has written to Edmund and that she tries to 
assert that the law is hers and what she chooses to make of 
it. Here again the parallel is precise for Mary was mined 
mainly by the so-called Casket Letters, the love-letters 
to Bothwell from which we have been quoting, and she 
certainly believed that she was above the law. 



Bothwell and Edmund — Rizzio and Oswald 185 

Alb. Shut your mouth, dame, 

Or with this paper shall I stop it: — hold, sir; 
Thou worse than any name, read thine own evil: — 
No tearing, lady; I perceive you know it. 

{Gives the letter to Edmund.) 

GoN. Say, if I do, — the laws are mine, not thine : 
Who can arraign me for't? 

Alb. Most monstrous ! oh ! 

Know'st thou this paper? 

GoN. Ask me not what I know. 

Here we have Goneril confronted and ruined by her own 
love-letters to Edmund, just as Mary was confronted and 
ruined by her love-letters to Bothwell. 

It is obvious, also, that Goneril has planned her husband's 
death for she has, at any rate, definitely arranged her 
marriage with Edmund. 

Albany says : 

For your claim, fair sister, 

I bar it in the interest of my wife; 

'Tis she is sub-contracted to this lord, 

And I, her husband, contradict your bans. 

If you will marry, make your loves to me, 

My lady is bespoke i. 

The curious detail of the rival love-letters between the 
two sisters is exactly paralleled in Sonnet 6. 

Buchanan in his Detection speaks with bitter anger of the 
contract for Mary's marriage having been made before 
Bothwell's divorce. He says: 

This contract was made the 5 th of April, within eight weeks 
after the murder of the King... also it was made seven days 
before Bothwell was acquitted, by corrupt judgment, of the 
said murder. Also it appears by the words of the contract 
itself, that it was made before sentence of divorce between 
Bothwell and his former wife, and also in very truth was made 
before any suit of divorce intended or begun between him and 
his former wife. 

^ v. iii. 



1 86 Bothwell and Edmund — Rizzio and Oswald 

Here again we may note the close parallel in the situation : 

Edmund claimed by Goneril at the very moment when 

Regan claims him on a pre-contract: 

Reg. In my rights, 

By me invested, he compeers the best. 
GoN. That were the most, if he should husband you. 
Reg. Jesters do oft prove prophets^. 

Moreover Lady Bothwell was, apparently, as jealous of 
Mary as Regan of Goneril; thus on April 30th, 1567 Drury 
wrote to Cecil: 

The Lady Bothwell is now for the yielding to the divorce 
of another mind, and says she will never say untruly of herself, 
but will die with the name of the Lady Bothwell 2. 

We may compare Regan : 

Now, sweet lord. 
You know the goodness I intend upon you ; 
Tell me, — but truly, — but then speak the truth. 
Do you not love my sister? 

^ ^ H: 4c H: ^ 

I never shall endure her : dear my lord. 
Be not famiUar with her 3. 

Even after the marriage the rivalry did not cease for 
Mary remained furiously jealous of Bothwell's former wife. 
Thus on June 21st, 1567 de Silva writes*: 

They say for certain that differences have arisen already 
between Bothwell and the Queen (an evil conscience can know 
no peace) and it is asserted that Bothwell passes some days a 
week with the wife he had divorced. 

Bothwell, of course, commanded as large forces in Scot- 
land as Edmund commands in King Lear. Thus we find 
Kirkaldy of Grange writing to Bedford on May 8th, 1567 : 

The chief occasion why these noblemen desire the Queen of 
England's aid is rather to take Bothwell out of Dunbar and 

1 V. iii. 2 state Papers, Foreign Series. 

3 V. i. * Simancas Papers. 



Bothwell and Edmund — Rizzio and Oswald 187 

Edinburgh; not only has he the two principal strengths, but 
also all the munition of the realm. 

This exactly resembles the situation in King Lear where 
Regan gives all her armies into Edmund's charge even while 
she remains savagely jealous of her sister. 

Reg. Methinks our pleasure might have been demanded. 
Ere you had spoke so far. He led our powers; 
Bore the commission of my place and person; 

^ ^ •{• •(* •!■ •!* 

GoN. Not so hot: 

In his own grace he doth exalt himself. 
More than in your addition. 

Reg. In my rights, 

By me invested, he compeers the best^. 

It is also curiously interesting to observe that these his- 
torical events were put into dramas at the time. Thus, 
Drury writes to Cecil, May 14th, 1567 : 

There has been an interlude of boys at Stirling of the manner 
of the king's death and the arraignment of the earl.... This was 
before the Lords, who the Earl thinks were devisers of the same. 

Even the poisoning of Regan had its prototype in the 
Darnley story. It is true that Lady Bothwell was not 
poisoned but it was very generally believed at the time that 
such an attempt had been made. Thus de Silva, the 
Spanish Ambassador, asserted that there was a plan for 
Bothwell to get rid of his wife either by divorce or by 
poison. On March 30th, 1567 we find Giovanni Correr in 
France writing concerning Scottish affairs : 

The Cardinal of Lorraine has been warned by letters from 
his friends in Scotland that many of the chief personages there 
had suspicion, and had almost come to the conclusion that he 
had advised and procured the death of the king, and that he 
must therefore be upon his guard. 

^ V. iii. 



1 88 Bothwell and Edmund — Rizzio and Oswald 

...In confirmation of the above the Enghsh ambassador gives 
out... that almost immediately after the death of the King of 
Scotland the wife of one of the principal personages of the 
kingdom died of poison and it was reported that a marriage 
between the queen and this personage would follow. 

This extract is doubly interesting because it shows how 
commonly the Darnley murder was believed to have been 
one of the crimes of the House of Lorraine and how many 
people believed that the poisoning of Bothwell's wife had 
really taken effect. 

We may compare the situation in King Lear : 

Reg. Sick, O sick ! 

GoN. {Aside) If not, I'll ne'er trust medicine. 
***** 

Reg. My sickness grows upon me. 

Later on we hear that Regan is dead and that Goneril 
has confessed to poisoning her : 

Gent. Your lady, sir, your lady; and her sister 
By her is poison'd; she hath confess'd it, 

and Edmund replies : 

I was contracted to them both. 

Here again it seems to me impossible to overlook the 
parallel situation. When we remember that this love-story 
was in neither of Shakespeare's sources and that it exists 
quite clear and definite in the history, we must surely confess 
that the historical source is far and away closer to Shake- 
speare's drama than any possible combination of the accepted 
literary sources. 

The character of Oswald, again, is not to be found in any 
of the Chronicles, either in Geoffrey of Monmouth or in 
Hclinshed. On the other hand Rizzio as a servant, Rizzio 
as an impudent, low-born mischief-maker repeatedly appears 
as a source of discord between Mary and Darnley. 



Bothwell and Edmund — Rizzio and Oswald 189 

On February 7th, 1566, Randolph writes to Cecil: 

David yet retaineth still his place not without heart-grief to 
many that see their sovereign guided chiefly by such a fellow. 

David Chalmer's Chronicle (1572) says: 

There was a servant of the Queen's who was an Italian, called 
David Riccio...who was but a man of base lineage.... This 
David came in great favour with her Majesty, but greatly 
misliked of all the people, yet she made him her servitor and 
secretary. 

...he showed all the malice he could to sow discord between 
the Earl Murray and the Lord Darnley, thinking thereby to 
get the Earl of Murray out of Court, whom he esteemed then 
his greatest unfriend and so it came to pass that the Earl was 
constrained to leave Court. 

...David dealt with the nobility that the Lords should be 
forfalted, which procured the malice of the whole people to him. 

Melville says in his Memoirs : 

David Rizzio was retained in her service as a varlet of her 
chamber... he grew so great that he presented all signatures to 
be subscribed by her Majesty; that some of the nobility would 
gloom upon him, and some of them would shoulder him and 
shoot him by, when they entered in the Chamber and found 
him always speaking with her Majesty. 

Now here we have again a situation almost exactly similar 
to that in King Lear. 

Rizzio is a main cause of the difficulties between Mary 
and Darnley, and Oswald is made a main cause of the diffi- 
culties between Lear and Goneril and is certainly the agent 
of Goneril's meanest cruelties; he is a servant, a "varlet," 
a man of low birth, yet he is particularly insolent ; he makes 
it his business to insult Lear. I have pointed out before the 
parallel between Murray and Kent and here again we notice 
that, just as Rizzio came into special conflict with Murray 
and was the cause of his being banished from the Court, so 
Oswald came into special conflict with Kent. 



190 Bothwell and Edmund — Rizzio and Oswald 

Lear despises Oswald just as furiously as Darnley despised 
Rizzio. 

He asks concerning him^: "Where's that mongrel? " and 
in the next sentence "Why came not the slave back to me 
when I called him? " 

It is Oswald who taunts Lear with his powerlessness and 
with being no more than " My lady's father" and in the end 
provokes Lear to strike him. 

Oswald, we observe, is Goneril's secretary, for it is he who 
writes to Regan on her behalf: 

How now, Oswald. 
What, have you writ that letter to my sister? 

In Kent's quarrel with Oswald we have exactly such a 
character ascribed to the latter as the friends of Darnley 
ascribed to Rizzio ^i 

A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, 
shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted- 
stocking knave; a lily-liver'd, action-taking knave; a whoreson 
glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-in- 
heriting slave.... Draw, you rascal: you come with letters 
against the king, 

and when Cornwall asks Kent "Why art thou angry? " Kent 
replies : 

That such a slave as this should wear a sword. 

That wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these. 

Like rats, oft bite the holy cords a-twain 

Which are too intrinse t' unloose ; . . . 

A plague upon your epileptic visage ! 

Now this was exactly the view of Rizzio's character taken 
by the Scottish Lords; it is not one whit too strong and it 
is certainly the view taken of Rizzio's function in the state. 

We observe also the parallel in point of time. When 

1 I. iv. - II. ii. 



Bothwell and Edmund — Rizzio and Oswald 191 

Goneril first starts the persecution of Lear, Oswald is her 
instrument; it is this base servant and secretary who de- 
Uberately insults the powerless king, who incites him and 
his followers to frenzy, and it is a quarrel concerning Oswald 
which brings about the final rupture between Lear arid 
Goneril. 

So, when Mary first quarrelled with Darnley, it was 
Mary's confidence in Rizzio that enraged him; it was the 
precedence of a man so base-born which drove the proud 
Stuart to frenzy; he was filled with hatred and contempt 
for the "varlet" and it was, of course, the Rizzio murder 
which brought about the final rupture with Mary. 

In the second part of the play Oswald passes out of sight 
but Goneril was at that time absorbed with her paramour — 
Edmund — and her rivalry with Regan ; it is Edmund who is 
made the instrument for the final destruction of Lear. So 
again, when the Rizzio trouble was at an end between Mary 
and her husband it was only to give way to the still more 
serious Bothwell trouble and to Mary's infatuation for a man 
who was, just as Edmund was to Goneril, her leading soldier 
and also her leading noble. 



CHAPTER XIII 

KING LEAR AND ST BARTHOLOMEW 

I POINTED out in dealing with Macbeth that the Gunpowder 
Plot had reminded the English of the massacre of St Bartho- 
lomew and that material chosen from the story of the 
Coligny murder appeared to have been used in the com- 
pilation of Macbeth. 

This also I believe to be, but in an even more interesting 
manner, the case with King Lear. 

Let us remember that, before the Gunpowder Plot re- 
minded England of these two crimes, they had already been 
associated in the popular mind. Thus in the Huguenot 
Memoirs^ I have so often quoted, the St Bartholomew 
massacre and the Darnley murder are treated as parallel 
crimes, both inspired by the Catholic League, both planned 
and executed by the House of Lorraine and Catherine de 
Medici, and in each case there was supposed to have been 
direct contact with the powers of hell. Agrippa d'Aubigne 
accuses Catherine of witch-practices precisely similar to 
those already analysed in Macbeth^. 

Buchanan's account of the Darnley murder, the very 
account we have been studying in the preceding chapters, 
is inserted into the midst of a narrative of the affairs of 
France. 

The Darnley murder was repeatedly termed a "parri- 
cide" by contemporaries and exactly the same term was 
applied to the Coligny murder. The royal family of France, 

^ Memoires de I'estat de France sous Charles IX. 
2 Les Tragiques. 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 193 

Catherine, Margaret and Charles IX, were in the habit of 
addressing CoHgny as "father." Very naturally this title 
lent a horrible irony to the circumstances of his murder. 
The Huguenots, in their intense admiration for Coligny, 
termed him the "father" of his country and compared 
France to an ungrateful child destroying its father. 

Then, again, Coligny possessed almost regal power. The 
house from which he descended had certain royal privileges, 
among them being the right to have a personal retinue of a 
hundred knights. Moreover Coligny 's power over a certain 
portion of France, particularly the provinces of the Loire, 
was so absolute that he was practically a king in that region ; 
he was very generally known as " the second king of France." 
I might mention here that the river Loire (the Liger of the 
Romans) is known as the river of Lear in such Elizab'ethan 
chronicles as Fabyan, so the provinces of the Loire would 
be to an Elizabethan the provinces of Lear. Spenser terms 
Coligny Guyon^ (i.e. Guienne) and the name of Lear points 
just as plainly to the region of his power 2. 

It was, of course, jealousy of Coligny 's almost royal power 
which urged on Catherine de Medici to her dreadful deed. 
It was the same idea which caused the Parisian populace 
to crown the effigy of Coligny with straw. Shakespeare's 
Lear, we may remark, crowns himself with wild flowers 
which are flowers of the field. 

Coligny was also considered as being in quite a special 
way, the victim of his own over-confidence and the prey of 
his own excessive trust. Many members of his own party, 
including the ever-faithful Joan of Navarre, had warned 
him against Charles IX and Catherine, but Coligny believed 

^ Faerie Queene, Bk. ii. 

2 Note. He was also Grand Admiral of France and, as such, would 
have control over the Ligurian Sea which is known as the Sea of Lear. 

W. M. 13 



194 i^m^ Lear and St Bartholomew 

in the professions of affection made to him by the royal 
family; he trusted himself completely in their power, the 
result being one of the most infamous betrayals in history. 

Coligny seemed to his friends at the time as if he were 
almost besotted with excess of confidence. 

Now in certain of its main outlines the Coligny story 
really does resemble the Darnley story; in both we have 
flattery and false professions of affection used to ensnare a 
victim, in both cases the murder is termed a "parricide." 
In both cases the victim has possessed either royal power 
or a claim to royal power. 

It was thus not difficult for Shakespeare to blend the two 
stories in one and here, exactly as in Macbeth, he was working 
to a pre-existent unity in the minds of his audience. The 
supreme pathos of Lear, his helplessness, his futile rages 
are derived from the story of Darnley, which even modern 
historians have termed "the most pathetic in the annals of 
Scotland." But there is more in Shakespeare's Lear than 
pathos ; there is a terrific force and energy, there is a Titanic 
power and passion, heroic courage and heroic dignity which 
cannot have been derived from the Darnley story alone, but 
which are entirely appropriate to Coligny and still more ap- 
propriate if Coligny is taken as representative of France itself. 

Neither does Bothwell's invention of the thunderstorm 
seem in the least adequate to suggest the terrific thunder- 
storm in King Lear which is surely one of the most appalling 
tempests ever conceived by the imagination of man. On the 
other hand the civil wars in France are repeatedly compared 
to a terrific tempest sweeping the land, filled with lightnings 
of wrath and hate, drowning France in deluges of her own 
tears, filled with cyclones of lamentations and bitterly cold, 
cold with the absence of all human charity^. 

^ See Memoiressurrestatde France sons Charles IX, also P. Mathieu's 
Deplorable Death of Henry IV, also D'Aubigne's Les Tragiqiies. 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 195 

It was simply the commonest of all metaphors for the 
Civil Wars. Now surely a conception like this is great enough 
even for the tempest in King Lear'^ 

Now Shakespeare's Lear is depicted as an old man but 
still a man of tremendous force and energy ; Coligny , at the 
time he was murdered, was an old man as that time counted 
age and he himself appealed to his murderers to respect his 
white hairs, yet Coligny was a man still of tremendous 
physical force; the Lear of Shakespeare had been a great 
soldier, accustomed to war, so had Coligny who was un- 
doubtedly one of the greatest soldiers of his age. 

The Lear of Shakespeare is a man of terrific passions, 
capable of most appalling rages and unequalled impreca- 
tions; so was Coligny who, when angry, rated the whole 
royal family of France with the utmost fury. 

Lear is stripped naked in a tempest and deserted of all; 
we have already recalled the terrible story of how the naked 
body of Coligny, deserted by all, was exposed to the jeers 
of the passers-by. The body was thrown into the Seine, 
dragged out again, hanged on a gallows and a fire was lit 
beneath; Coligny's followers said that his naked body was 
exposed to all the outrages of the elements of fire, earth, air 
and water. So is Lear's naked body exposed to the outrages 
of the elements. Coligny's followers declared that Coligny 
was the father of his country, outraged by his ungrateful 
children and that all France suffered in his person. All 
France is with him exposed naked to the tempest of St 
Bartholomew. Singing ribald songs the populace of Paris 
crowned the effigy of Coligny with straw, and, singing sense- 
less songs, Lear crowns himself with wild flowers. 

After his death Coligny's very furniture was judged and 
condemned to be destroyed, and in King Lear we have the 
bitter irony of the trial of the joint-stools. 

13—2 



196 King Lear and St Bartholomew 

Here, surely, we have ideas tremendous enough even for 
Shakespeare's drama? If we regard Lear as being simply 
the story of a remote king in the bronze age whose tale, in 
the original, was not a tragedy at all, then surely it is much 
too appallingly great for its subject? 

But if Lear is, in some sort at least, the tragedy of a whole 
nation agonizing in the horrors of civil war, the tragedy of 
one of the greatest nations of the world reduced almost to 
the level of the brutes, when we remember that Shake- 
speare probably feared a similar fate for his own country, 
then the reason for his terrific grief becomes at once 
manifest. 

Read Agrippa d'Aubigne's Les Tragiques'^, his lamenta- 
tions over the fathers who try to murder their sons, the 
sons who drive their fathers into exile, the brothers who 
fight in a duel to the death, the old men groping with 
trembling hands over the bodies of their children dead before 
them, the deluges of tears, the lightnings, the bitter cold, 
the food which is rats and mice and even human dung — 
study all this and you will see for yourself either that Les 
Tragiques contains D'Aubigne's reminiscences of King Lear, 
or at least that he is describing precisely similar things. 

Nor is D'Aubigne the only French author who shows this 
close resemblance. 

As we have said, P.Mathieu, the Historiographer-Royal of 
France, tells us how France was like a father who preferred 
an illegitimate son — Henry, Duke of Guise — to the legiti- 
mate son — Henry of Navarre; how the legitimate son was 
banished and reduced to the most miserable poverty; how 
the illegitimate son triumphed but betrayed his father into 
enemy hands (i.e. those of Spain); he tells how Navarre, 
even in poverty and disgrace, remained loyal to his father- 
1 Commenced 1577, published 1616. 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 197 

land — France — and guided and helped it; how when his 
fatherland, mutilated and its eyes closed, was about to dash 
itself to pieces, he — Navarre — intervened and saved it^. 

In King Lear the conflict between the two sons is ulti- 
mately decided by gage of battle and Edgar (still nominally 
an exile) wins back his right. This also corresponds to the 
history, for Navarre did, of course, ultimately win his 
kingdom by force of arms. 

Let us deal now with the parallels in more detail : 

On August 26th, 1566, Fitz-william writes to Cecil anent 
Coligny: "The admiral is of great power and well-beloved 
of all the best soldiers in France. It is thought that he has 
at commandment 30,000 men." Here we have the almost 
royal power of Coligny. 

In the Life of Jasper Colignie by Golding, published by the 

VautroUier Press in 1576, we read : 

It is certain that that house had the right of sovereignty... 
they had power of life and death over the people of their 
signiory and to coin money... and to raise taxes. 

Here we have both royal dignity and royal power. 

Boule 2 also says that Coligny was commonly known at the 
time as the "second king of France," that he was by temper 
dominant and haughty, violent in altercation and that, on 
one occasion, he offered the king ten thousand men as if 
he were himself a monarch : 

Cependant, comme la reine mdre croyait tout le parti con- 
sister dans la tete de Coligny, la mort de ce deuxieme roi de 
France fut d'abord seule resolue.... 

Cependant 1' amir al...et ait dur, hautain, mal habile, vio- 
lentant les conseils, tenant des colloques secrets avec le roi. 
II lui offrit un jour dix mille hommes, 

Henry Martin says that Catherine urged on her son to 

1 Deplorable Death of Henry IV, Grimstone's translation, 1612. 

2 Catherine de Midici and Coligny. 



198 King Lear and St Bartholomew 

the murder by telling him that the admiral played the part 
of a king and treated him — Charles — as a subordinate; 
"I'amiral joue le roi, fait de lui I'instrument de ses ambi- 
tions." 

The Queen of Navarre was termed "sister" by the royal 
family of France. Thus we read in a Huguenot tract pub- 
lished in 1573 at Basle and entitled: "Dialogues au quel 
sont traites plusieurs choses avenues aux Lutheriens et 
Huguenots de la France." 

La Royne de Navarre vint trouver a la fin le Roy duquel 
(ce disoit-il) elle estoit la meilleure tante, la plus desiree, la 
mieux aimee...la Royne-mere la recueillit comme sa tres chere 
soeur. 

The same writer says the king treated Coligny "en son 
pere propre." 
We may also compare de Thou : 

Coligny came to Paris though the greatest number of his 
friends were opposed to it; they dissuaded him with impor- 
tunity both by speech and by letter. He, however, placed 
fullest confidence in the king. Some of the letters were very 
sharp; they reminded him that it was a decree of the Papists, 
confirmed by the Councils, that it was not necessary to keep 
faith with heretics. 

...The king has been educated in a school in which he sucked 
in with his milk the lesson of making a game of oaths and of 
perjury and of taking in vain the name of God, and of de- 
faming himself by irreligion and dissimulation. 

...He (Coligny) was advised to flee from the Court as from 
an infected cloaca. 

De Thou adds "The King called Coligny 'father' because 
of his age and merit." 

Here we surely have a situation closely parallel with that 
in King Lear. We have the misplaced confidence of the 
victim who ignores the sharpest warnings given by his 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 199 

friends; we have the enthusiastic professions of affection, 
the taking of false oaths in the name of God^ : 

I love you more than words can wield the matter; 
Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty; 

or 

I profess 
Myself an enemy to all other joys. 
Which the most precious square of sense possesses ; 
And find I am alone felicitate 
In your dear highness' love. 

Remember that the death of Lear has already been de- 
cided and these words acquire a new irony and a new 
horror. The Huguenot Memoires sums up the situation: 
"L'Amiral convie a la Cour aux nopces d'une soeur de 
Roy, apres mille sermens et mille caresses, y est massacre." 
A thousand oaths and a thousand caresses really does 
express the attitude of Goneril and Regan to Lear, and if 
we know that, all the time, his murder was resolved we 
surely find a new depth of terror in Shakespeare's play? 

Coligny was permitted a bodyguard of nobles when he 
came to the court, just as Lear, though renouncing all other 
powers, kept his bodyguard of knights. None the less 
Coligny's trust was so great that to his friends he appeared 
almost senseless. Laval ^ sums it up: 

The admiral lulled by the great regard which the King 
feigned to have for him became almost senseless... he was angry 
with all those who were not so credulous as himself and could 
not bear to see distrust in anybody. 

The Admiral, Laval insists, was repeatedly and con- 
tinuously warned but he could not believe: "he recalled to 
his mind the many repeated Oaths of the King, of his 

1 I. i. 

2 History of the Reformation in France. 



200 King Lear and St Bartholomew 

Mother and of the Duke of Anjou and he would take no 
warning." 

Now surely we have here a situation exactly paralleled 
in the opening scenes of King Lear', we have a venerable 
man termed "Father," the recipient of the deepest pro- 
fessions of affection confirmed by many oaths, who, as if 
besotted, accepts all these professions at their face value; 
we have him warned both by the lady who is called "sister" 
and by his faithful servants, we have his obstinate credulity 
and we have his anger against the very friends who warn 
him. 

In order to make the parallel more precise we have the 
attitude assumed by the Queen of Navarre. She had no 
confidence in Catherine; she profoundly mistrusted the 
Court ; she saw through all their flatteries and she could not 
understand Coligny's infatuation. We may quote from her 
last letter to her son : 

I am not at liberty to talk with the King, nor with Madam 
but only with the Queen Mother who deals with me very 
scurvily 

I have complained three times to the Queen; but she laugh'd 
at me and behind my back makes me say quite the reverse of 
what I have said. In so much that I am blamed for it by my 
friends and I do not know how to give the lie to the Queen... 
she laughs in my face and uses me in such a manner that you 
may say that my patience exceeds Griselda's. 

...I am sure if you knew the trouble I am in you would pity 
me; I am treated with the utmost rigour, vain talking and 
banters, instead of being treated with gravity....! have re- 
solved not to put myself into a passion, it is a wonder to see 
my patience.... The corruption is much greater than I could 
have imagined. 

Here again we surely have the closest parallels to the 
opening scenes of King Lear. We have the figure of Joan 
of Navarre set over against Catherine and Margaret as 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 201 

Cordelia is set over against Goneril and Regan. We have 
the impudent hes which Joan sees through but feels power- 
less to fight. We have Joan's perfect clearness of insight 
just as we have Cordelia's perfect clearness of insight : 

I know you what you are; 

And like a sister am most loath to call 

Your faults as they are named. 

We have Joan's patience, comparing herself to Griselda, 
just as we have Cordelia's patience. We have Joan's con- 
tempt for the falsity of Catherine just as we have Cordelia's 
contempt for Goneril. Finally we must remember that 
Catherine calls Joan "sister." 

Nearly all narratives of the Coligny murder begin with 
the story of the marriage. The Memoir es already alluded to 
certainly does so and we notice that King Lear also begins 
with a marriage plan, for the marriage of Cordeha was to 
have been settled in the first scene; also the marriage in- 
volves the future disposal of the kingdom and the two are 
to be settled together; so did the actual historical marriage 
involve the future disposal of the kingdom. 

The Memoires proceed to explain that part of the St 
Bartholomew plot was to withdraw Mary Queen of Scots 
from prison and make her Queen of England ; this is a main 
reason why the Huguenots treat the two crimes — St Bartho- 
lomew and the Darnley murder — as one series of events 
destined to avert the Protestant succession in England and 
France, and to place both countries in the power of the 
Guises. This appears to have been the general Protestant 
point of view and it gives us an additional reason why the 
two crimes should be connected in the popular mind and 
why Shakespeare should link them together in a drama. 

The Memoires give us first the French marriage and the 
flattery which entraps Coligny, then Buchanan's story of 



202 King Lear and St Bartholomew 

Mary Queen of Scots and then the murder of Coligny ; this 
is, very largely, Shakespeare's order in his play. 

The Memoires narrate how Catherine de Medici murdered 
the Queen of Navarre; she was supposed to have been 
destroyed by poison, either by poisoned gloves or, in some 
versions, by a poisoned necklace. So in Shakespeare's play 
Cordelia is represented as murdered at the instigation of her 
sisters. 

The Memoires dwells on the character of the Queen of 
Navarre; she uttered no word of complaint or impatience; 
she was wonderful in her constancy and firmness and truth. 
She was perfectly truthful though her enemies alienated even 
her husband and won him by flattery from her side. 

Qui est un exemple rare et remarquable a la posterite; veu 
encore que depuis elle y a employe, je ne diray pas seulement 
jusques a ses bagues et joyaux, mais aussi hazarde sa vie 
mesme et tout ce que elle avoit de plus cher. 

Her lands were declared forfeit and she herself dispossessed 
of all: 

ne laissa-elle de porter le tout avec telle patience et magnani- 
mite chretienne, qu'on ne pouvait dire qu'elle fit paroistre 
avoir aucun regret de s'etre embarque en cette cause. 

No remonstrances availed to make her change her re- 
ligion and she possessed the most wonderful integrity; she 
never flattered or dissimulated: "elle n'espargnoit aucuns, 
ains rondement et sans rien flatter ou dissimuler." 

Now surely this has the most wonderfully close resem- 
blance to Cordelia? Cordelia also utters no word of com- 
plaint or impatience ; like Joan of Navarre she is perfect in 
her dignity. Cordelia also is wonderful in firmness, constancy 
and truth; these are precisely the leading lines of her 
character as Shakespeare has drawn them. Just as Joan's 
nearest — her husband — was turned away from her and 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 203 

alienated by the wiles and flatteries of Catherine, so was 
Cordelia's best-beloved — Lear — alienated and turned away 
from her by the wiles of Goneril. 

Just as Joan gave up all her possessions and lost her 
lands for the truth and ultimately life itself, so did Cordelia 
give up all her lands for the truth. Joan bore all this with 
patience and magnanimity; so did Cordelia bear it with 
patience and magnanimity. 

No remonstrances or threats could make Joan change her 
religion, and no remonstrances and no threats could make 
Cordelia utter a word she believed untrue. 

Joan has wonderful integrity and never flattered or dis- 
simulated; so also has Cordelia wonderful integrity and it 
is her entire incapacity for flattery and dissimulation that 
does most to impassion us on her side. 

It was in 1563 that the Pope published his celebrated 
Monitory against the Queen of Navarre ; she was summoned 
to appear at Rome and in the event of her contumaciously 
refusing she was deprived of all her possessions and her 
kingdoms and principalities, sovereignties, lordships, do- 
mains — to be given to those on whom his Holiness may be 
pleased to bestow them. 

St Croix made an offer to Antoine de Bourbon on behalf 
of the Pope that his marriage with Joan should be annulled, 
that she should be deprived of her dominions for the crime 
of heresy (as the Huguenots put it for the sake of "truth") 
and that these dominions should be bestowed on Antoine de 
Bourbon ; his new bride was, of course, to be Mary Queen of 
Scots. 

It seems to me that the parallel is complete. Cordelia 
also loses her inheritance because of her truthfulness ; Lear 
repudiates her and is alienated from her and turns to Goneril. 



CHAPTER XIV 

KING LEAR AND ST BARTHOLOMEW (cont.) 

CoLiGNY was famous for the discipline he had introduced 
among his troops: Golding in his Life of Jasper Colignie 
says: "Jasper gave his soldiers the strictest warlike disci- 
pline so that they were neither to curse nor swear nor to 
make havoc and spoil." 

We may compare this with the way in which Lear defends 
the character of his knights: 

My train are men of choice and rarest parts, 
That all particulars of duty know, 
And in the utmost exact regard support 
The worships of their name^. 

Even more striking is the fact that Goneril states, as a 
reason for objecting to Lear's knights, that they give Lear 
the power to raise a conspiracy and to hold Goneril and 
Albany at his mercy ; Albany protests against this view and 
tells Goneril she may " fear too far," upon which she retorts 
that it is better than trusting too far. 

It is the exact argument that Catherine de Medici used 
in relation to Coligny; Charles IX wished to spare him and 
Catherine persuaded the reluctant king that Coligny's nobles 
were a danger to the royal family as he might put himself 
at the head of these Huguenots and seize control of the city. 
The plea was absurd but it served its purpose. 

It is notable that the curses Lear utters upon Goneril 
seem exactly applicable to Catherine de Medici. He first 
curses her with sterility : 

from her derogate body never spring 
A babe to honour her! 

1 I. iv. 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 205 

he then adds : 

If she must teem, 
Create her child of spleen ; that it may Uve 
And be a thwart disnatured torment to her ! 

This almost exactly reproduces the destiny of Catherine 
who was sterile for a long time after her marriage and whose 
children grew up to conflicts with her, to bitter jealousies 
among themselves and to be one of the most evil broods 
who ever cursed France. 

A Huguenot tract published at Basle in 1573 reads: 

Je vous laisse a penser de quel naturel peuvent estre ses 
enfans, qui sent nourris de son laict...pour le comble de tout 
malheur, elle les a faits instruments de leur ruine, de I'estat et 
de la couronne. 

The tract goes on to curse them quite in Lear's manner as 
*'les tyrans les plus horribles et les traitres le plus felons 
qui ont este, sont et serons a jamais," and wishes that they 
and all their posterity may be banished from human 
society. 

One curious detail may be noticed here. The tract to 
which I have already referred (Basle 1573) says that the 
Huguenots caused: 

faire un tableau... ou le cardinal de Lorraine, la Royne sa 
niece, la Royne mere et la duchesse de Guise estoyent peints 
au vif nuds, ayans les bras au cols, et les jambes entreslaces 
Tun avec I'autre. 

They found means of sending it into the chamber of the 
Cardinal when he was holding a Council; the picture was 
unpacked and all those present saw and understood the 
deadly insult. This insult was supposed to have had a most 
untoward result upon the fortunes of the Huguenots. 

Here we notice that in Protestant opinion the Cardinal 
of Lorraine, Catherine de Medici and Mary Queen of Scots 



2o6 King Lear and St Bartholomew 

were all knitted together in one nude tangle of licentiousness, 
adultery and incest, making them absolute monstrosities. 
We may compare this with the terrible passage in which 
Lear says of his daughters^: 

The fitchew, nor the soiled horse goes to 't 

With a more riotous appetite. 

Down from the waist they are Centaurs, 

Though women all above: 

But to the girdle do the gods inherit, 

Beneath is all the fiends' ; 

There's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit. 

Burning, scalding, stench, consumption. 

Nothing like this, of course, is found in the Chronicle 
sources of Lear; but it does represent precisely the way in 
which the Protestants regarded Mary, Queen of Scots, and 
Catherine de Medici. 

Coligny was also insulted by the cutting down of his 
retinue. As head of a house which had certain royal privi- 
leges he was allowed a hundred nobles as his attendants. 
In 1569 he was insulted by being ordered to cut down his 
retinue from a hundred to fifty lances. Lear was, of course, 
allowed precisely a hundred knights and Goneril proposed 
to cut them down to fifty. 

When Coligny was left alone, robbed by death or treachery 
of all his supporters, Joan of Navarre stood by him in his 
darkest hour and she alone sustained him. 

We may observe that at the battle of Moncontour in 1569 
an incident happened which is a close parallel to King Lear. 
Coligny was severely wounded by a pistol discharged in his 
face which shattered his jaw; he maintained himself un- 
flinchingly in his saddle, despite the agony of his wound, 
but the Huguenots were defeated and a great massacre took 
place. 

^ IV. vi. 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 207 

D'Aubigne sums up the matter^: 

The Admiral saw faUing to his share, blame for accidents, 
silence as to merits. He saw too the remnant of an army which, 
even before the last disaster, had been in unutterable despair — 
towns feeble, garrisons fearful, enemies powerful and without 
pity — least of all for him. 

This aged sire, unable to articulate from his wound, shaken 
with fever, suffering from the thought of afflictions, which 
thoughts agonised him worse than his wound, was carried from 
the field in a litter in danger of death. He found himself 
abandoned by all the great except a woman, Joan of Navarre 
who, having of woman only the name, had advanced to Niort 
to stretch out her hand to the afflicted and to deal with affairs. 

A modern historian ^ has described the same situation: 

The admiral, grievously wounded and unable to articulate 
was conveyed to Niort in a litter.... Confined to his couch and 
unable to justify himself by word, or by action, Coligny's 
agitation of mind threatened alarming results. Relief, however, 
was already on the road to the camp. The tidings of the defeat 
of Moncontour were no sooner received by her than Jeanne 
d'Albret quitted La Rochelle and, attended only by her usual 
suite of gentlemen, she traversed the country, beset by perils 
innumerable and safely arrived at Niort. Coligny received the 
queen as an angel sent from heaven to his rescue; and tears 
bedewed the cheeks of the stern warrior as he clasped the royal 
hand stretched so compassionately towards him. The admiral 
was deserted by his officers and nobles who showed no pity 
for his deplorable condition.... 

Jeanne's indignation was greatly excited at the isolation of 
the admiral and she publicly expressed her opinion of the selfish 
ingratitude of his officers... her presence and support cheered 
the admiral and exercised the most beneficial effect upon his 
health 3. 

Now here we surely have the closest parallels to Lear. 
Coligny is carried in a litter, stricken almost to death, unable 
to articulate, deserted by his followers, accused of impru- 

1 Histoire Uitiverselle, iii. ^ M. W. Freer. 

^ See also Davila, Les Guerres Civiles. 



/ 



2o8 King Lear and St Bartholomew 

dence, fevered and almost wandering in mind and in an 
agony of mental suffering that threatens his life. Joan of 
Navarre appears, venturing in the midst of many perils, 
and is received almost as an angel of heaven by Coligny. 

So is Lear carried in a litter, so is he deserted by almost 
all, so is he unable to articulate, fevered in mind and in an 
agony of mental suffering that threatens his very life; so 
does Cordelia go to his rescue, venturing in the midst of 
many perils and so did she appear to him as if from another 
world : 

You are a spirit, I know: when did you die? 

Coligny kissed the hand of Joan and Lear wished to kneel 
to Cordelia; Coligny wept at the meeting and so did Lear, 
for he said : 

mine own tears 
Do scald like molten lead. 

Joan of Navarre expresses her anger at seeing Coligny so 
deserted, and Cordelia expressed her anger at seeing Lear 
so deserted. Does it make this scene any the less nobly 
beautiful to know that it really happened and that the fate 
of a great nation turned on it? 

The doctor whom Joan of Navarre brought to Coligny 
was Ambrose Pare, the most famous surgeon of his time; 
he made many improvements in medicine; he also made 
many improvements in the treatment of the insane, in place 
of the old brutality substituting a gentler treatment in 
which music played an important part. So the doctor whom 
Cordelia brings to Lear tries music for his cure and is a 
master of gentleness and sympathy. Such traits would be 
in themselves sufficient to identify the humanest and greatest 
physician of France. 

The Huguenots repeatedly termed Coligny the father of 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 209 

his country torn in pieces by his ungrateful children. Thus, 
in the Memoirs one of the epitaphs signed "N. M. " includes 
the lines : 

Proh scelus, hoc prohibes, patriae patria impia patrem 
Saevis dilanians unguibus ipsa tuis. 

The impious country with her fierce nails rends her father. 
We may compare this with what Gloucester says to 
Goneril when he takes Lear away ^ : 

Because I would not see thy cruel nails 

Pluck out his poor old eyes; nor thy fierce sister 

In his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs. 

The epitaph goes on to speak of the sufferings of Coligny's 
body from water and from fire, neither drowned nor con- 
sumed and finally hung up on the gallows : 

Optarunt sepelire nefas hoc flumina tantum, 
Optavit tantum flamma piare nefas. 
Lacerum, mersum arbustumque cadaver, 
Tandem appendit barbara turba cruci. 

So also is Lear's body exposed to water and fire, and 
finally bound, as he puts it, on a "wheel of his own pain." 

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout 

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires... 
Singe my white head ^ ! 

Another epitaph, signed "A. F. P.," runs: 

Et terra et ponto passus discrimina mille, 
Aere jactatur Gasparus in vacuo, 
Scilicet ut tellus ingens et pontus et aer 
Tantam conclament undique saevitiem. 

T* V 5K T* *15 'l* 

Terra negata tibi nequaquam, Gaspare, terras 
Ipse negaris; eras coelesti ab origine totus; 
Te totum voluit caelum, nil terra recepit. 
^ III. vii. 2 jii^ ii^ 

w. M. 14 



210 King Lear and St Bartholomew 

Coligny has suffered much on earth and sea and tossed in 
the empty air ; the great earth itself, ocean and air ahke cry 
out on the fierceness shown to him ; it is, in vain, however, 
that the shelter of the earth was denied ; heaven itself claims 
him. So Lear suffers from all the elements of air, earth, water 
and fire and counts them less cruel than his children: 

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters. 
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness, 

and appeals to heaven as being on his side : 

O heavens, 
If you do love old men, 

if yourselves are old. 
Make it your cause i. 

Another elegy, signed "L. D. N.," identifies Coligny with 
his country: 

Terra dolens tremuit, diris ululata querelis, 
Heu patria, et patriae concidit ipse Pater. 

The earth shudders with wild lamentations, for the father- 
land itself falls with its father. We may compare Lear's 

And thou, all shaking thunder 

Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world. 

Another elegy (L. B. D.) laments the dismembered corpse 
and the refusal of earth to a hero who yet is worthy of 
heaven : 

Coeli sunt digni munere, non tumuli. 

So we have Lear's pathetic: 

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, 
The gods themselves throw incense 2. 

^ II. iv. Compare also D'Aubigne, Les Tragiques, "Le corps tout 
feu dedans, tout glace par dehors, Demande la bidre et bien tost 
est faict corps." He is speaking of France. 

2 V. iii. 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 211 

Another elegy identifies Coligny as France itself; now he 
is deprived of head, hands and feet, what can prevent the 
ruin and fall of France? S. M. M. 

Quid mirum si trunca pedesque manusque caputque, 
Patre suo extincto Gallia prona ruit ? 
Quid mirum si tota ruit viduata cerebro ? 

****** 
Quid mirum si stare nequit, si labitur expes ? 

****** 
Caspar, quod si firme tuo tu stante manebas? 
Gaspare, quid mirum si pereunte peris? 

There follows an invocation to France: 

Crede mihi, veri si me non fallit imago. 
Hie certa exitii pendet imago tui. 

France, widowed of her own brain, will fall to destruction. 
How can France stand when she has no feet? France herself 
is hung aloft in the image of Coligny. 

This passage is particularly interesting as showing how 
Shakespeare may have meant his Lear, in some degree at 
least, as a symbol of France herself, of Lear's loss of his 
mind as France, "widowed of her brain," while the whole 
idea of France slipping and falling to destruction suggests 
a possible meaning for Gloucester and the precipice scene 
a meaning which, as we shall see, is confirmed also by 
passages in P. Mathieu. 

The lines about Coligny's loss of his head suggest a really 
terrible meaning for the fool's comparison of Lear to "the 
hedge-sparrow that fed the cuckoo so long that it had its 
head bit off by its young," and of Lear's own comparison: 

Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand 
For lifting food to 't^? 

1 III. iv. Compare also Agrippa d'Aubigne, Les Tragiques: "Ton 
chef mange tes bras, c'est une faim trop grande. . .c'est indice de mort." 
(He speaks of France.) 

14—2 



212 King Lear and St Bartholomew 

A. C. M. is another writer who completely identifies 
Coligny with France. While he lived he was, as it were, 
the genius of France and, now that he is dead, France is 
the corpse of France : 

Cujus sit petis haec imago? cujus 
Casu Gallia, Galliac est imago. 
» * * * * 

Hie est Gasparus ille qui fuit, dum 
Vixit, Gallia Galliae, perempto 
lUo, Gallia Galliae est cadaver. 

Lear's death is the passing of a whole era in French 
history, of the extinction of a whole generation of the 
heroic French Protestants; but in the person of Edgar or 
Henry of Navarre the new era steps in and takes their place. 

A. M. S. declares that Coligny had lived only for France 
and would gladly have died for her. Fiercely like a beast 
she has destroyed him, but while he stood she stood also 
and when he falls she too falls; she owed her happiness to 
him and will owe her misery to herself. Here again we have 
a close parallel with Lear; Lear has been devoted to his 
daughters and has given all to them. They destroy him with 
brutish ferocity and they also destroy themselves. The 
continued idea of the fall and of the whole of France falling 
suggests again the precipice motive : 

Vita ego vivus eram tibi Gallia; mortuus ah mors 
Sum tibi, quem volui vivere morte mea. 

****** 
Tu me stabas stante, cadente cadis. 
Extinxti m^e teque simul, fera Gallia. 

So also in King Lear are victim and persecutor extin- 
guished together. 

I could quote many more of these elegies but the central 
idea is nearly always the same. Coligny is the father of his 
country betrayed and murdered by his ungrateful children ; 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 213 

his naked body is exposed, deserted and defenceless, to all 
the outrages of the elements which are still less cruel than 
his children; Coligny is the genius of France, he is France 
itself, in his person all France is naked, all France is out- 
raged, all France falls headlong to destruction, all France 
is slain. None the less she will revive and live again. 

Is it possible to avoid seeing the parallel with King Lear; 
the father who has given all for his children, who would 
serve them to his last breath, who is exposed naked to all 
the assaults of the elements, who loses his brain (a really 
appalling metaphor), and perishes of his own excess of trust 
and of the black treachery of those he trusted? N. C. M. 
speaks bitterly of the fraud and guile by which he was 
destroyed : 

Victus inaudita fraude doloque jacet. 

A. D. D. cries that he lived for France and perished in 
his endeavours to serve her; by her fury against him she 
has become the tomb both of him and of herself : 

II vivoit a la France, en la France vivant, 
II est mort a la France, a la France servant. 
****** 

La France est le tombeau de lui et d'elle-mesme. 

The same poem goes on to declare that the man who had 

risked his head a hundred times for France is now without 

head: 

Celuy qui pour la France a sa teste cent fois 
Expose a la mort, sans teste tu vois. 

****** 
Va, France, ingrate! va. 

It is, incessantly, repeatedly, over and over again, the 
great situation of King Lear : the father who has given all 
for his children and trusted them wholly, the hideous 
treachery, the hideous ingratitude, the naked body exposed 



214 -fCm^ Lear and St Bartholomew 

to the outrages of all the elements and France destroying 
herself and perishing with him. 

The elegies on the Queen of Navarre are no less instructive : 

Dum mens continue coelestia spirat, anhelum 
Deficiens corpus cessit, humique jacet. 

We may compare it with the immortal lines : 

She's dead as earth. 

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have Hfe 

And thou no breath at all? 

Another elegy by G. O. F. reads: 

Vixi : quemque mihi cursum mea fata dedere, 
Per saevam belli rabiem, perque invida mundi 
Crimina, jam per te felix et tuta peregi. 

So had Cordelia passed through the fierce rage of war 
and the "invida crimina" of the world, so had she passed 
happily and safely beyond ; even before she dies Lear takes 
her for a "soul in bliss" and is sure that the gods throw 
incense on her sacrifice. 

So also with S. P. : 

Nam sibi non fuerat, patriae sed nata juvandae. 

****** 
Quae patriae vixit, nee sibi nata fuit. 

She did not Uve for herself but was born for her 
fatherland, she lived for her fatherland and was not born 
for herself. 

Surely it is the epitaph of Cordelia? 

I have before pointed out that, after Coligny's death, he 
was judged and condemned and hanged in effigy; his castle 
was to be burnt and all his furniture. 

It is this piece of absurdity, the judgment of the effigy 
and the punishment of the furniture, which, I believe, is 
satirised by Shakespeare in the trial of the joint-stools^. 

1 III. vi. 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 215 

Lear, representing France in its mood of insanity, appoints 
Edgar the madman and the Fool as judges; they sing insane 
songs and judge the furniture guilty. Could there be a more 
appalling satire on the historic scene? 

In King Lear we have further the fact that Albany is not 
in sympathy with Goneril; he reverences Lear and protests 
against Goneril's cruelty; he gives way to her out of love 
and because of his own weakness, but he feels pity for his 
victim and ultimately relents and repudiates Goneril. 
Cornwall, on the other hand, is wholly in sympathy with 
Regan and eager to persecute Lear. This, again, is true to 
the historical situation. Charles IX loved and reverenced 
Coligny; he was too weak to combat his mother and his 
brother, but he protested at the time and afterwards re- 
pented his share of the tragedy. On the other hand his 
younger brother — the Duke of Anjou — was a willing ac- 
complice in all. Cornwall, we may remember, was stabbed 
by one of his own servants who revolted against him, and 
this was precisely the fate that did befall Anjou when he 
was Henry III. He died by the dagger of Jacques Clement. 

Throughout the drama there is continual talk of dissen- 
sions between Albany and Cornwall: 

There is division, 
Although as yet the face of it be cover'd 
With mutual cunning, 'twixt Albany and Cornwall^. 

This exactly expresses the state of affairs between the 
Valois princes, for Charles IX continually suspected his 
brother — Anjou — of plotting against him. 

P. Mathieu in \i\?> Deplorable Death of Henry IV '^ also sheds 
much light on King Lear. I cannot help believing that he 
had read the drama and understood it. 

1 III. i. 2 1 610. Translated 1612. 



2i6 King Lear and St Bartholomew 

He speaks of his master — Henry : 

As his breeding had inured his body to travail... fortune had 
made his mind invincible to accidents... in the end she was 
forced to confess that his courage did surpass the violence of 
her attempts^. 

Mathieu says of Henry's privations in the civil war " that 
which will hardly be credited in another age, he had some 
difficulty... to repel hunger which doth never force kings." 
And again, "He felt a great delight to have reduced life to 
that point, as no cross of fortune might alter her." 

Mathieu speaks of the contempt universally felt for 
Henry HI and the rivalry of his two possible heirs — Navarre 
and Guise : 

They did no more look of him (Henry IH) but as the sunset 
of his realm ; all mens eyes were turned upon two princes, both 
great in courage and in reputation. The one had a Crown 
already and the law of the kingdom called him to a second; 
the other had great parties to get it and to keep it being gotten. 

The heart of the one was inclined to love the other, they 
were seen in one chamber in the Louvre, they went a-hunting, 
made matches at tennis, played at Dice, visited the ladies 
together. The King of Navarre carried the Duke of Guise 
behind him on horseback through the streets of Paris : he loved 
him as his kinsman... this love degenerating into hatred was 
the cause of great ruins as we shall see. 

Now here we surely have a close parallel to the relations 
of Edmund and Edgar who are brothers, but whose fraternal 
love turns to the bitterest opposition. We have the mis- 
fortunes of Henry of Navarre, his hard toils of mind and 
body, his poverty and hunger, but his unfailing courage. We 
have the contest between the two princes, both claiming 
the crown of France, one having legal right on his side, the 
other possessing a strong party. 

"These two," says Mathieu of Navarre and Guise, "were 
the greatest personages that France ever bear and two of the 
greatest captains in the world.... The King (i.e. Henry III) 
1 Grimstone's Translation 1612. 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 217 

suffered the one to force him to make war upon the other.... 
Henry, notwithstanding, came to the rescue of the king." 

Now here again we have parallels to King Leay, Edmund 
is certainly a great captain and leader just as Guise was a 
great captain and leader. Gloucester suffered one of his 
sons — Edmund— to turn him against the other — Edgar — 
just as the king suffered Guise to turn him against Navarre. 
Navarre, notwithstanding this, came to the rescue of the 
king in his affliction in spite of the fact that the king had 
made war upon him and when Henry III in his exile from 
his capital had no one to turn to but Navarre ; so does Edgar 
come to the rescue of Gloucester when Gloucester is outcast, 
deserted and in affliction. 

P. Mathieu explains that Navarre was confined in the 
court where his life was in danger, but he escaped and fled. 
So also was Edgar's life in danger from his father's fomented 
wrath against him, so does he escape and flee. 

The reader will remember Edmund's method of effecting 
the alienation; by a feint he gets Edgar to draw his sword 
upon him, then pretends Edgar was attacking his father. 
So did Guise attack the Protestant party — Henry among 
them — and then pretend that they were making war on 
the king. Mathieu explains that Guise's real object was the 
death of Henry III and his own seizure of the crown; so of 
course Edmund's object was to dispossess his father and to 
seize the power of Gloucester which he did. 

We may observe, incidentally, Gloucester's curious belief 
in astrology which is exactly like that of Henry III. 

Mathieu just like D'Aubigne and the authors of the 
Memoirs compares the civil wars to a tempest sweeping 
France. Navarre was exposed to these tempests, bore the 
brunt of them, and, of course, suffered severely^. 

1 The "storm" recurs three times in King Lear and so did the 
civil wars in France. 

14—5 



21 8 King Lear and St Bartholomew 

In his Panegyric of Henry IV, Mathieu further writes 
concerning the civil war: 

This war taught him great lessons of patience, constancy 
and frugality.... His presence did revive their daunted spirits... 
who would no more serve a cause miserably dejected, con- 
demned by the king's edicts and pursued with pubUc 
hatred.... His virtue did not exempt him from the outrages 
of necessity. 

Here again we have a situation resembling that of the 
outcast Edgar who never loses his courage but sustains his 
companions in misfortune in all " the outrages of necessity." 
It is more than probable that Edgar's miserable condition 
is meant to typify the miserable sufferings of that younger 
generation of France. D'Aubigne repeatedly terms France 
frenzied and mad^ with her sufferings, and so Edgar appears 
as a Tom o' Bedlam. Edgar says of himself that he eats 
"the swimming frog, the toad, the wallnewt — swallows the 
old rat and the ditch-dog 2." He even says that he eats 
"sallets of dung." This was literally and truly the diet 
of the wretched people at the siege of Sancerre, and on 
many other occasions; D'Aubigne gives a hst including 
Shakespeare's items and many more fearful still; he 
specially refers to "the excrements of men and animals." 

As for the faults of which Edgar accuses himself they 
were exactly the faults of Navarre: they are the faults of 
lust and gaming: 

one that slept in the contriving of lust and waked to do it: 
wine loved I deeply, dice dearly; and in woman out-para- 
moured the Turk. 

...Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks 
betray thy poor heart to woman ; keep thy foot out of brothels, 
thy hand out of plackets. 

^ Les Tragiques. ^ ill. iv. 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 219 

Mathieu says of the murder of Henry III of France: 

That fearful blow did strike France to the heart and reduced 
it to that estate, as if it had not been speedily supported by 
that great Prince, it had fallen in pieces. He received her and 
cherished her as if he had been born for France and not France 
for him. 

Now here we surely have the closest possible parallel to 
the central episode in the Gloucester story. Gloucester like 
France has been sorely wounded; he wishes to cast himself 
over a precipice just as France was in danger of falling in 
pieces. It is just then that Edgar receives and cherishes 
him as if he were the parent and Gloucester the child, 
precisely as Navarre receives and cherishes France. 

Mathieu continues: 

What other spirit than his would have been capable to temper 
the passions of mens minds? What Ulysses could have con- 
tained so many contrary winds in one bottle? And yet in the 
midst of all this his heart is firm and his soul quiet. 

Here again we have the metaphor of the terrible tempests 
and Navarre's constancy in the midst of them. 
Mathieu continues : 

France which during her sleepy and insensible stupidity, had 
suffered her members to be cut off by pieces, began to open 
her eyes which she had kept shut, for that she would not know 
her own miseries nor feel her infirmities and now that she feels 
her own wounds she desires to be cured. 

He speaks of Henry's success in succouring France : 

This feehng was the infallible crisis of the country's health; 
hope revived good men and confusion amazed the wicked. 

This body had yet some sound, vigorous and perfect parts 
and it had good blood to restore it. 

Here again we surely have a mythology as closely as 
possible resembling Shakespeare's Gloucester story. France 



220 King Lear and St Bartholomew 

suffers hideous mutilation, the country is bhnd; but Henry 
comes with his succour and brings renewed hope. 

This surely is the story of Gloucester? 

Nor is this all! Everyone remembers the extraordinary 
apparition of the devil which Edgar pretends that he has 
seen and who has just departed. As Edgar represents it, 
it was the devil who had tempted Gloucester to cast himself 
over the precipice, but who had let go of his prey or at least 
had departed from him leaving him still sound. 

This again appears to me to be plainly an allusion to the 
story of Henry HI. 

He was quite commonly accused by the Guisards his 
enemies of having given himself into the power of the devil 
and was in fact identified by them with the devil prophesied 
in the Apocrypha. There is an extraordinary pamphlet en- 
titled: "Les Propheties Merveilleuses ad venues a I'endroit 
de Henry de Valois...jadis Roy de France," and published 
in 1589. 

This pamphlet declares that Henry IH was exactly the 
devil prophesied in the ninth chapter of the second book of 
Maccabees. 

He was therefore so wholly evil that 

il meritoit aussi estre prive de sa couronne et sceptre, et qu'il 
fust chasse comme indigne de regner, et vivre en quelque lieu 
retire, ou bien d 'estre envoye en exil et d 'estre puni rigou- 
reusement. 

Now Gloucester actually is "chased out" as unworthy of 
reigning, he has to live in a retired place, he is sent in exile ; 
but Shakespeare like most Englishmen took the part of the 
unhappy king and represents him as tempted by the devil 
and almost destroyed but nevertheless escaping. 

Also without doubt, just as in P. Mathieu's interpreta- 
tion, France is symbolised in his person. Henry of Navarre 
succours him and succours France in him. 



King Lear and St Bartholomew 221 

Another significant detail is that, when Edgar comes to 
the rescue of Gloucester, he pretends to be a peasant and 
speaks in a strongly marked southern dialect. Now why? 
I have seen no rational explanation of this. 

If Edgar, however, is really Navarre the explanation is 
perfectly simple; Navarre was brought up in his early life 
as a peasant among peasants, he was so markedly a peasant 
in his hardiness and endurance that he was called by his 
enemies le roi montagnard and he spoke in a strong southern 
dialect, the dialect of his own Beam. 

The peasant with the strong southern dialect who is also 
a great noble and prince is a clear identification of Henry 
of Navarre. 

Mathieu says again of Henry: 

He hath brought France to a more happy estate than she 
herself durst hope for, whereas having scarce either pulse or 
spirit, after the death of the late king, she cast herself in his 
arms. 

It is always the same metaphor, always the symbolism 
like that of Shakespeare — France reduced to the last ex- 
tremity and saved by Henry alone 1. 

Mathieu observes that France had suffered so much in 
the civil v/ars "that it became a retreat of wild beasts which 
durst not go into the forests," and he speaks of the abun- 
dance of the wolves. D'Aubigne in Les Tragiques says re- 
peatedly that men themselves seemed turned into wolves 
and tigers. We have again the same symbolism in King 
Lear where Goneril and Regan are compared to wolves and 
boars and tigers. 

1 Compare also D'Aubigne: 

c'est toy qui as porte 
A tes juges, proscrit, le present de la vie: 
lis out par toy, banni, recouvre la patrie, 
De toy, leur prisonnier, receu la liberte, 
(He speaks of Henry.) 



222 King Lear and St Bartholomew 

And now what is the final conclusion to be? 

I find it to be in the case of Macbeth and King Lear 
exactly as in the case of Hamlet, that Shakespeare is really 
writing of his own age and that his work is a kind of 
symbolic mythology. The reason we have ignored it so 
long is because, as I have already explained, we assumed 
there was no essential difference between the psychology of 
the sixteenth century and the psychology of the nineteenth. 
The method of symbolic mythology which I find in Shake- 
speare is simply the method of his age. 

The whole of Spenser's Faerie Queene is precisely such 
symbolic mythology ; so are most of Lyly's plays ; so in all 
probability is Sidney's Arcadia. So are Ben Jonson's 
Masques. So is much of Drayton. 

The historians themselves slip into it at every turn. We 
find it quite unmistakably in Buchanan's Detection and 
Oration. 

It is the same with the Frenchmen, D'Aubigne, Ronsard 
and Malherbe, whose poems are full of such symbolic 
mythology; it invades the histories of D'Aubigne and 
De Thou; P. Mathieu writes works, ostensibly historical, 
which are one mass of such symbolism. The Memoir es so 
often referred to write historical prose on one page and the 
same material, turned into mythological poetry, on the 
next page. 

It is only by studying the mentality of Shakespeare's 
contemporaries that we can understand the mentality of 
Shakespeare himself. 

I cannot but say that I think we much under-estimate his 
meaning and with the meaning the terror and beauty and 
splendour of his work. 



APPENDICES 

APPENDIX A. THE SCOTTISH WITCH-TRIALS 

Miss Margaret Murray's book on The Witch-Cult in 
Western Europe has appeared since I wrote the above 
chapter. It gives, I think, confirmatory evidence of very 
great value. 

Miss Murray beHeves that the witches were grouped in 
** covens" usually numbering twelve members and that each 
coven had an actual living person who was its "devil." She 
further believes that the "devil" of the North-Berwick 
witches was Francis, Earl Bothwell and that his real aim was 
to gain the crown for himself. One of the most pertinent 
passages runs as f oUows : 

Every one, including James, respected Bothwell. Even if 
they did not acknowledge his divinity, they feared the magical 
powers which, as Chief of the Witches, he was supposed to wield. 
It is impossible to study the details of this period without 
realising the extraordinary fear which James had of his cousin ; 
it was fear with an underlying horror, totally different from his 
feeling towards his other turbulent subjects. When Bothwell, 
seeking pardon, was introduced into Holyrood Palace by Lady 
Athol in the early morning of July 24, 1593, he entered the 
King's chamber...." The king... asked what they meant. Came 
they to seek his life? let them take it — they would not get his 
soul." This remark, made in the urgency and excitement of the 
moment, is highly significant. Had Bothwell been, like many 
of James's other enemies, merely an assassin, James would not 
have spoken of his soul. But Bothwell as the Devil of the 
witches had the right to demand the yielding of the soul, and 
James was aware of the fact. 

A circumstance of this kind, of course, sheds a still more 
terrible light on the superstitious horror with which Bothwell 
would be regarded by the king. 



224 Appendices 

APPENDIX B. ARIEL 

Pierre Mathieu says of Henry (Panegyre) : 

He had need of as many eyes as Argos to watch... as many 
Armes as Briareus to labour.... It seemed that his Canons and 
regiments had wings, having marched above a hundred and 
fifty leagues in two months. His counsels pass the wisdom of 
those that counsel him, his designs prevent the foresight of his 
enemies.... 

This Prince was an Eagle in warre which soared into the 
clouds when they thought to take him and fell suddenly upon 
them which held him to be further off. 

...He casts the firebrand of war upon those who had set 
France on fire.... He strikes everywhere as soon as he threatens. 
He seems to be mounted on Pegasus, to be in all places where 
his presence is necessary... his authority like a spirit of life dis- 
perseth itself throughout all the members of the body.... Artil- 
lery is an invention so new, so terrible and so different from all 
the ancient engins, as we may say that at these days we make 
war not with iron, as in former time, but with fire, not with 
violent force, but with wisdom.... 

His forehead glistering like a Comet at the encounter of 
Fountaine Francoise, forced the Constable of Castile to flee... he 
clipped the wings of victory to the end that she should not fly 
out of France. 

(This is surely a most illuminating phrase !) 

Mathieu says again: 

The lightning which should be feared of those which are not 
touched with it, is ready to fall. Justice shows the lightnings 
afar ofi, valour causeth the thunder to be felt.... His canons, 
echoing in the Alps amazeth all Italy.... The Ambassadors... 
were so amazed as they thought that enchantment, taking from 
them the true substance of that which they sought, had sub- 
stituted a fancy. 

In the poem attached to the Panegyric Mathieu says: 

In Ivry fields he seems a blazing star. 
Who least fear him, on them first he falls. 



He that commanded Victorie at will. 

(Grimstone's Translation 1612.) 



Appendices 225 

Henry's own letters often contain similar phrases, as when 
he entreats his friends to "fly" to battle "swifter than air." 

I propose to deal with this subject later. Here it is only 
necessary to point out that Ariel seems to embody the 
essential qualities of Henry's genius as Pierre Mathieu saw 
them: the air-like swiftness, the flight through the air (like 
Pegasus), the unexpected appearances (like an eagle), the 
all-observant watchfulness (eyed like Argus), the foresight 
and prevention, the fiery force, the meteor-like brilliancy, 
the unexpectedness and swiftness which are so great that 
they appear like enchantment. 

There is doubtless more in Ariel than this, but I am con- 
vinced that it is one meaning of the character. 



INDEX 



Abbott, parallel between Hamlet 

and Essex, lo 
Albany, title of, 153 
Ambassador, French, suspected of 

part in Gunpowder Plot, 55 
Arthurian Empire, 39, 42-3, 94 

Belleforest on Mary Stuart, 60-61, 

Bergson, philosophy of, 2 
Blackwood on Mary Stuart, 60-6, 

9'' 151. 157 

Boas on Macbeth, 37 

Bothwell the Elder, 33-5 ; ambition 
of, 65-6 ; cleansing of, 78 ; dagger 
of, 74-5, 89; servants, 84; witch- 
craft, 87 ; part in crime, 166-191 

Bothwell the Younger, 29, 144 ; con- 
nection with witches, 95-101 ; 
Catholicism of, 99-100 

Bottom the weaver, 6 

Bottomley, Gordon, on King Lear, 

141 
Boule on Coligny, 197 
Bradley of C., 2, 15-16, 144 
Browning, psychology of, 16-17 
Buchanan, Detection and Oration, 

32. 35, 66-70, 86, 146-8, 151-3, 

163-80, 185 

Caliban, 6 

Cartesian idea of time, 2 

Casket Letters, 181-5 

Catherine de Medici, 1 15-120, 204-6 

Cecil's Memoranda, 148, 150 

Censorship of Stage, 3-4, 20-24 

Chalmers, David, Chronicle of, 162, 

192 
Charles IX of France and Macbeth, 

30, 116, 123-9, ^''^^ Coligny, 

190-99, 204 
Coleridge, psychology of, 14; on 

Kin^ Lear, 141 



Coligny, murder of, 8, 121; murder 
a parricide, 192, 194; father of 
Royal Family, 33, 193, 198, 200; 
father of France, 33-5, 193-5, 
208-214; confidence of, 199; 
royal power of, 193; at prayer 
when murdered, 119; bids com- 
panions escape, 121; France itself, 
194; nakedness of, 195; his 
knights, 206 ; appropriately named 
Lear, 193 

D'Aubigne, Agrippa, 125-8, 194-6, 

207 
De Croc, letters of, 15, 163, 179 
De Serres, Jean, 118, 143 
De Thou, 1 17-122, 122-5, 198 
Divine Right of Kings, 49-51 
Drury, letters to Cecil, 180, 186-7 
Duff, murder by Donwald, 38, 59- 

62, 65, 89-92 

Fawkes, Guy, 133-4 
Figgis on Divine Right, 489 
Fool, symbolism of, 160 

Gardiner on Gunpowder Plot, 47 

Garnet, trial of, 142-3 

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 139-40 

Gowry, Earl of, 44 

Great Britain, name of, 43; Unity 

of, 51 
Gunpowder Plot, 28-31, 41-3, 53-6, 

131-5, 146 

Hamlet and the Scottish Succession, 
1,18, 56, 94; Hamlet and Gonzago 
story, 4, 93 ; Hamlet and Essex, 
5, 18, 56-7, Amleth saga, 25-57 
Henry HI of France, 219-222 
Henry IV of France, 12-14, 17; 
marriage of, 120; and Charles 
IX, 125; as Edgar, 216-222 



228 



Index 



Higher Criticism, method of, 3 
Holinshed ChrojiicL's, 38, 58, 62, 
76-7, 83, 86, 89-92, 104, 117, 
120, 139-42, 148-50, 153 

Joan of Navarre, daughter of 
France, disinherited for truthful- 
ness, 15, 35, 202-3, 214; sister to 
Catherine, 198; despises flattery, 
200 ; constancy of, 203 ; supports 
Coligny, 206-8; elegies on, 214 

Keyes, Robert, 133 
Kirkaldy of Grange, 74, 78 

Laval on Coligny, 199 

Lear, King, sources of, 139; origin 

of name, 193; appropriateness to 

Coligny, 193 
Lee, Sir Sidney, on Macbeth, 38, 

on King Lear, 138 
Legend of Mary, 70 
Lennox, 73-4 
Lorraine, badge of, 67; House of, 

187; plots of, 201-6 

Malone, 10 

Masson, on union of crowns, 45-6; 

on Both well the Younger, 102-3 
Mathieu, Pierre, 12-14, 129-30, 

143-5, 194-7 
Melville's Memoirs, 66, 78, 85, 95, 

105, 148-51, 159 
Memoires de Pestat de France sous 

Charles LX, 66, 78, 85, 128, 143, 

194-99, 201-3 
Merchant of Venice, 6, 189 
Miracle and Mystery plays, 19, 

134-5 
Murray as Kent, 179, 189 

Pare, Ambrose, 208 

Philip H of Spain, 15 

Pitcairn, Ancient Scottish Criminal 

Trials, 69, 70-2, 96-9, 105-12, 

164-5 
Plumptre and Darnley murder, 10 



Privy Council of Scotland, letters to 
James, 45, 95; register of, 79, 
100-3, 115 

Prophecies fulfilled in Macbeth, 41, 
51 ; of Sibylla Regina, Thomas 
the Rymer, etc., 49-50 

Psychology, historical development 
of, 4-5, 14-19; of Ben Jonson and 
Spenser, 4 ; defects in application 
of method, 15-20; of Spenser, 17, 
222 

Randolph, letters of, 154-6, 158-61, 

189 
Rizzio, 153-4, 161, 188-91 
Robertson on Bothwell, 65 
Robertson, J. M. on Hamlet, 18-19 

Saint Bartholomew, a tempest and 

thunderstorm, 8, 34, 209-13; 

comparison with Gunpowder Plot, 

53-7 ; the Bell, 1 18-119 
Selden on Gunpowder Plot, 42 
Sidney, Sir Philip, conception of 

poetry, 134; Arcadia, 143-4, i67» 

180 
Spanish State Papers, 42, 43, 78, 

88, 161 
Stage and Politics, 3, 21-4, 87 
Stuarts, genealogy of, 40 
Symbolism, use by poets, 5-8, 12; 

by historians, 34-5, 222 

Tieck on Shakespeare, 10 
Tudors, genealogy of, 40 

Union of the Crowns, 31 

Venetian State Papers, 42, 54-6, 187 

Witches, 29; relations to Bothwell 
the Younger, 95-100, Appendix 
A; in Holinshed, 104; power of 
prophecy, 96, 105-6; familiar 
spirits, 105; raising storms, 96-7, 
106-8; ceremonies, 106-12; and 
Catherine de Medici, 115 



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